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SERMONS OF A
CHEMIST

if BY
EDWIN E. SLOSSON, PH.D., LL.D.

Author of “Easy Lessons in Einstein,” “Creative Chemistry,”
“Major Prophets of Today,” etc. Editor of “Keeping
Up with Science,’ etc. Director of Science
Service, Washington

NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N, J.

TO
BROTHER ALFRED
WHOSE SERMONS WERE THE INSPIRATION OF MY YOUTH
AND TO
SISTER FLORA
WHOSE SYMPATHETIC ASSISTANCE HAS MADE THIS BOOK POSSIBLE

THE AUTHOR DEDICATES IT
WITH GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Princeton Theological Seminary Library

https://archive.org/details/sermonsofchemist0Oslos

PREFACE

A SERMON by a lay-preacher may be worth listening to.
It gives a parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to
the observers from two very different points of view. If
you wish to get the distance of a heavenly body, you know
that you must take two observations from remote points of
view,—in midsummer and midwinter, for instance. To get
the parallax of heavenly truths, you must take an observa-
tion from the position of the laity as well as of the clergy.—
Suppose a minister were to undertake to express opinions
on medical subjects, would you not think he was going
beyond his province?—said the divinity student. Let us
look at this matter—I said. If a minister had attended
lectures on the theory and practice of medicine, delivered
by those who had studied it most deeply, for thirty or forty
years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a year,—if
he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
approved text-books on the subject,—if he had seen medi-
cine practised according to different methods, daily, for the
same length of time,—I should think, that if a person of
average understanding, he was entitled to express an opinion
on the subject of medicine, or else his instructors were a
set of ignorant and incompetent charlatans.

OLIVER WENDELL HoLMEs.

These remarks by “The Professor at the Breakfast Table”
must serve as my justification for this book.

But today the clergy are not so jealous of their preroga-
Vi

vi PREFACE

tive as they were in the time of Dr. Holmes. In fact, I
think that they are inclined to the opposite extreme, that
they relinquish too readily their function as teachers of the
church and are too much inclined to call in a layman, dis-
tinguished in other fields, to express his amateurish views of
the theological and ethical questions on which they are by
training and profession the expert authorities.

Be that as it may, the preacher nowadays is not perched
so high above his parishioners as he was in former times,
and it is easier to climb from the pew into the pulpit. As
professor and as editor I have frequently been called upon
for talks in college chapels, and as elder or deacon in
Presbyterian and Congregational churches for the last thirty
years I have occasionally had to occupy the pulpit when
the preacher failed to appear or during an interregnum in
the pastorate. On such occasions it is the custom for kind-
hearted members of the congregation, seeing that the
speaker was no preacher but was doing his best, to come
forward and shake his hand and express the polite wish
that they could see the sermon in print that they might
preserve it and ponder it at leisure.

I have figured up that if all those who have expressed
such a desire would buy a copy of this book the sale of the
first edition is assured. Anyhow it is worth trying the
experiment.

EDWIN E. SLosson.

CONTENTS

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE GREATEST MIRACLE IN THE
BIBLE x ” ; ; ; j

THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DatLty LIFE

THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER . : : : f
PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD .

BLACK AND WHITE . ; : : : : : ;
FAITH : : 2 : : ; : . d :
THE INTERNAL CONFLICT . : ‘ : : ‘
THE GREAT BACKSLIDING . \ : ; : ,
THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT . ,

THE UsEs oF ADVERSITY . 4 d : ;
LOOKING BACKWARD AND LIVING FoRWARD : 4
INVERTED Hypocrisy . : : 4 :

TELLING THE TRUTH . 2 j . : : k
Tue Duty or INTELLIGENCE y ! : : p
THE GEOMETRY OF ETHICS . ; : 4 :
RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

THE EtHIcs oF EVOLUTION . : 4 ;

A SERMON WITHOUT TEXT OR MORAL . : : :
EAcH IN His OWN TONGUE . oyu ks

WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN . : ; ;

Lest We FoRGET . : x ‘ ; , : )
Tue NINE SONS OF SATAN . ‘ d 5 : ;

INDEX } : : i , : ‘ i ( y
vii

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SERMONS OF A CHEMIST

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THE CHEMISTRY OF THE GREATEST
MIRACLE IN THE BIBLE

And God formed man out of the dust of the ground.
Genesis 2:7.

I HAVE chosen this particular miracle for discussion
for three reasons especially.

First, because it is such a remarkable event in itself.
It is, as it seems to me, unquestionably the greatest
miracle narrated in the Bible or out of it. Not only
has nothing stranger occurred in the history of the
world, but nothing so astounding has ever been imag-
ined by any romancer. This truth is stranger than
any fiction ever devised. The gulf between animate
and inanimate matter is so great that we cannot con-
ceive, if we did not know it was true, that a clod should
ever feel and think. The more we study it the deeper
appears the mystery. There is no other subject prob-
ably which is engaging so much attention on the part
of scientists. The problem is being attacked on the
one side by chemists and on the other side by physiol-
ogists, but it is not at all solved. They are like work-
men tunneling a mountain, who have been working
from opposite sides for years but have not yet met and
cannot yet see through it.

The importance of this miracle appears, too, when
we think that if it had never occurred this world would

be a mere insensate ball of stone rolling through space.
3

4 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

When we look at the stars on a clear night we count
thousands of these suns, each of which may have as
many planets as our sun. Yet of all the spheres in
God’s unmeasured universe this is probably the only
one on which this miracle of life has happened. All
worlds but ours are dead worlds. The chances against
such a thing occurring are millions to one. Yet it did
occur, and we here are living witnesses of it. It was
the birth, not of an individual, but the birth of all
mankind.

The second reason why I think this miracle may be
of interest to you is that it is of especial interest to
me. It is a chemical miracle. It is just as much a
chemical statement as that hydrogen and oxygen unite
to form water, and that wood burns to ashes, water,
and carbon dioxide gas, or that wine turns to vinegar.
It should be studied, tested, and examined in the same
way as any other phenomenon. It is because I know
something, although very little, about this miraculous
transformation that I choose it in preference to other
remarkable events belonging to departments of science
which I have not studied.

The third reason why I selected this miracle is be-
cause of its indisputability. No one can doubt that it
occurred. If I had taken other chemical miracles, for
example, the changing of the river Nile into blood, or
the water at the marriage feast into wine, it might
have been objected by some that they did not believe
it. Some might have said with great reason that in an
unscientific age we could not expect an exact state-
ment of facts which would withstand all the destructive
criticism of after ages. Others might have said with

OUT OF THE DUST 5

equal reason that we are not expected to take literally
the legends of Orientals who are so much given to
allegory and metaphor. It would be useless for me to
talk about anything that you did not all accept as
literally true. And this particular miracle cannot be
doubted because we see it repeated all about us every
day, yes, even in our own bodies. For what was true
of Adam is true of us. Each one of us was created
out of the dust of the earth, not thousands of years
ago, but within the past few months. If any one raises
the objection that Adam did not exist, I will take in-
stead Adam Smith or any one you please. In the
original Hebrew, I have been told, “Adam” is not a
proper name; it is simply ““Man.” So far as we know
all men were formed from the dust of the ground, and
although it would be impossible to prove that Adam,
or some one else, was not created in a different way
from that described in the Bible, it is so improbable
as to be inconceivable. We have to accept this daily
miracle on faith, for we do not understand it.

God is the same yesterday, today and forever. His
laws are the immutable laws of nature. In him alone
there is no variation. If this were not so the world
would be a chance world where we could rely upon
nothing. Water might run up and down hill with equal
readiness. We might grow old one week and young the
next. We would plant wheat expecting a harvest in a
few months, but the seed might come up the next day
and then prove to be cabbages. It is only our faith in
the unaltering will of God that prevents us from ex-
pecting these things to happen. We do not know why
they don’t. We only believe they will not and never

6 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

have happened. So we have no hesitation in saying
that Adam was created as we were, that is out of the
dust of the ground.

It is no less a miracle as a result of direct natural
causes. A natural law is simply a statement of what
will happen under certain circumstances; and this
miracle is an unexplained chemical action. It does
not make it less a miracle that it has happened many
million times since Adam. It makes a difference in
the surprise it causes in us, but the act is the same
whether repeated or not. If I should be able to change
lead into gold, just once, without knowing how I did
it, under such conditions that no one could doubt it,
I would be regarded as the greatest chemist in the
world. Would that reputation be lessened if I could
repeat it every day? Or if I could explain how I did
it? Or even if I could teach others how to do it? On
the contrary, the more times the act was repeated, the
more completely the process was explained, so that any-
body could do it, the greater would be the admiration
aroused.

So a miracle is not the less a miracle if it can be
explained. Not that we can really “explain” anything
ultimately, but many things we can understand suffi-
ciently to satisfy all except the most curious among
us, and that we call “explaining.”

Those among us whose God is Lord of the Unusual
and Inexplicable alone live in a constant state of fright
lest he should be eventually expelled from the universe
by the finite minds of men. They are lovers of dark-
ness rather than light, not because their deeds are evil,
but because their faith is frail. But science is like a

NO LAWS IN NATURE vs

camp-fire on a dark night. As you throw more wood
on the flame, the lighted circle widens, but the sur-
rounding darkness expands in proportion and becomes
more impenetrable. As the area of enlightenment
spreads we come into contact with more mystery.

If a miracle is an event absolutely unique in the
history of the world, if it could never happen again
under any circumstances, then it does not matter in
the least whether it is authenticated or not. Science
can make nothing of it, not even the science of theology.
But if a miracle is a spectacular demonstration of a
universal law, then it is of permanent value to us. Its
value, however, is not at all dependent upon the pres-
ervation, or even the authenticity, of the record of that
particular instance. If some antiquarian should un-
earth a death-bed confession of Joseph Priestley stat-
ing that he had never discovered oxygen, and that his
paper, claiming that discovery, was a hoax, most chem-
ists would not care enough about it to read it. Priestley
may have been a fraud for all we know, but oxygen is
a reality as we all know.

Science is based not upon verified facts but upon
verifiable facts. It seems to me that religion rests
upon the same solid foundation. A transmutation
of bread and wine into flesh and blood is indeed mirac-
ulous and inexplicable, yet it is demonstrable and un-
deniable. Anybody can do it.

Some people have the idea that a miracle is a “‘viola-
tion of the laws of nature.” This is an absurdity
based on an exaggerated idea of what we call natural
law, a common misconception among those unfamiliar
with science. There are no laws im nature; there are

8 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

laws of nature which we make for ourselves. Strictly
speaking, scientists do not discover the laws of nature.
They invent them to describe the facts they find.
These are mere descriptions of what has occurred in
the past, and what therefore we have reason to believe
will occur under the same circumstances in the future.
A book on chemistry or botany is merely a history,
after all. There can be no such thing as a violation
of natural law, because it is self-contradictory. If the
statement in a textbook is a true law there Is no excep-
tion. If there is an exception the statement is not a
true law. It must be revised. You can violate the
Volstead Act and it still stands on the statute books.
If you violate a scientific law you abolish it or rather
you show that it never existed.

Another absurd idea commonly heard is that because
a miracle is the direct act of God it cannot be the result
of natural causes. Everything that occurs is, in a
sense, the direct act of God since without him nothing
could happen or exist. Of the miracles of the Bible in
many cases we are expressly told that there was an
adequate natural cause. For example, the drying up
of the Red Sea when the Israelites passed over. If
it had not been expressly mentioned that this remark-
able effect was caused by an east wind some people
would have imagined it as the act of God reaching
down and damming up the waters with his own right
hand; or we would have had medieval artists painting
pictures of angels sweeping back the waters with big
brooms.

It is related in the book of Joshua that when the
Amorites were fleeing from battle, after having been

STONES FROM HEAVEN 9

defeated by the Israelites, the Lord chased them all the
way up to Beth-horon and down on the other side,
to Azekah and as far as Makkedah, and cast great
stones down on them from heaven, and killed more of
them than the Israelites had slain by the sword.

Now imagine how an artist would represent that.
In the twelfth century he would have made a great
big old man with a long, white beard, throwing stones
out of an upstairs window at the flying soldiers. In
the sixteenth century he would have painted the Amo-
rites pursued by what he called angels, fantastic crea-
tures invented by himself, human beings with an extra
pair of limbs, feathered, attached to their scapulas
and held perpendicularly in such a way that they could
be of no kind of use for a support, since their pos-
sessors could neither flap them nor soar with them.

If the passage had been left without further com-
ment it would have been a stumbling block to Chris-
tian faith. Infidels would have jeered at it as im-
possible. Apologists would have tried to evade the
question in some way, or would have called it a viola-
tion of natural law and therefore a miracle. It was a
miracle, a wonder, and a sign, but it was not a viola-
tion of natural law, nor was it necessarily in any direct
sense more the act of God than everything else, for
the narrator goes on to mention incidentally the com-
parative number of persons killed, as he says, by these
hailstones. Reports of casualties from the victorious
side are always to be received with caution, as we
found in the late war, but the author evidently did
not think that by assigning a natural cause he was mak-
ing it less a miracle.

10 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

A natural law is simply a statement of what happens
under certain circumstances. If we drop a stone, it
falls to the ground. ‘The scientific way of stating it
is that the stone and the world are drawn together by a
force proportional to the product of their masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance
between them. The theistic way of stating it is that
God puts the stone and the world together. Both are
true; neither is an adequate explanation.

The particular miracle we are considering is prob-
ably the most completely inexplicable of all chemical
actions. All we yet know is a little about the way the
process goes on, but the more we know of it the more
curious and marvellous it is. For example, the ma-
terials which go to make up our bodies are found in the
soil, the water and the air, and yet we are not able to
make use of them directly. All the chemical elements
of which we are made and which we have to get in
our food are contained in any handful of dust we may
pick up. Yet we cannot eat it, or if we do we cannot
use it to build up our bodies.

One of the most important elements of our bodies
is nitrogen, our most expensive foods are those that
contain it. Now the air is four-fifths nitrogen. Two
minutes’ breathing would supply our need for the day,
and with every breath we inhale enough nitrogen to
meet our bodily wants for hours, but we let all the
nitrogen out again without using a bit of it. The
reason is that man is a dependent creature. Plants
live off of the soi] and we live off of them. Most plants
even cannot use this free nitrogen of the air, but have
to have it prepared for their use in the ground. We

THE DAILY RESURRECTION 11

are parasites of the plants, and if we eat animal food
we are parasites of parasites. So all the material of
our bodies comes ultimately from the earth under our
feet except the element oxygen which we get from the
air we breathe. Thirty times a minute we repeat this
miracle, some particles of non-living matter are drawn
into our bodies and become living matter, just as with
mathematical precision the reverse process is repeated.
Particles of carbon which have formed part of our
living bodies are thrown out with every breath and
sink into the Nirvana of the inanimate world, chang-
ing their allegiance from the animal to the mineral
kingdom.

This transformation from living to non-living matter
is just as great a miracle as the reverse process when
you think of it. If it is a wonder how we can live,
so it is equally inexplicable how we can die. Life and
death are the twin mysteries of the world. The double
miracle of death and resurrection is the regular rhythm
of life.t People say we die but once. Really we die

1 Does all this sound too rhetorical and metaphysical to be re-
garded as sober science? If so, I fear you have not kept up with
the trend of recent scientific literature. My language is tame and
prosaic compared, for example, with the following passages from
the latest and most authoritative work on the science of the
cell:

“It is perfectly correct, therefore, from this point of view to
speak of living and dead hydrogen atoms. We can even go farther
with the simile if we wish and say that when the living highly
reactive form of the atom passes to the dead, unreactive form, the
soul of the atom escapes at the moment of its death, for a ray of
light leaves the dying atom and travels onward in space, until per-
haps it encounters and is absorbed by some other dead hydrogen
atom, which it again raises to life by thus giving it a soul. What

12 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

every few years just as entirely as we ever shall.
That is, in the course of a few years every particle of
our bodies becomes part of the soil and air as com-
pletely and in the same way as when we are buried.
We are dying all the time, sometimes rapidly, some-
times slowly, but always surely. If we should, for
a few minutes, cease to die we should cease to live.
That is, if we should cease to throw off the waste mat-
ter from our organism we could not receive new and
energy-bearing matter from the plant and animal world.

Suppose a miserly man should say to himself:
“What is the use of spending money for more food?
I will not waste my substance by throwing it out upon
the air with every breath. I will simply keep what I
have, for I am perfectly satisfied with it.” The man
would be dead in ten minutes, poisoned by his own
breath. We can only gain when we spend. “He that

is this soul? It is a minute portion of the luminiferous ether; of
time and space; of eternity and infinity.

“For us it is oxygen which thus summons the dead from the tomb;
which vitalizes the dead molecules and atoms. The energy is
stored in certain of the atoms of the molecules of protoplasm in
the form of widened orbits of rotation of the electrons. It is this
which gives them the power of reacting and of passing back to
the dead. When such electrons fall back to more stable con-
figuration, the atom and molecule reverts to the dead and inert
form such as we keep in bottles. It is the oxygen, then, which
vitalizes all animals; but it is from the sun that the vital, radiant
energy has come. It is in fact the luminiferous ether which has
made things alive, for the ether is the great storehouse of energy;
it is itself nothing else than space and time; energy and time.
Energy is but ether divided by time. Quantity of energy is quan-
tity of ether per second. So all goes back to the ether; infinity
and eternity. From it is derived our energy and life.”—PROFESSOR
A. P. Matuews of the University of Cincinnati in General Cy-
tology, pp. 28 and 92.

CHANGING SKINS 13

loseth his life shall find it.” The molecules we give
off with our breath come back to us again charged
with new energy from the central power house, the
sun. The faster we die the more alive we are.

Not all parts of the body wear out equally fast.
The softer and more mobile tissues change most rap-
idly. The blood changes its composition constantly.
But even the particles of lime, carbon and phosphorus
in the solidest bone are constantly being taken out and
replaced by new ones just as a railroad bridge is re-
built, piece by piece, without tearing it down at any
one time. We get entirely new finger nails every four
or five months, and new toenails once a year. Our eye-
lashes last us only about a hundred to a hundred and
fifty days. We get a whole new skin oftener than we
get new clothes—that is, most of us—for that is re-
newed every month. The only part of the body that
is not completely changed in the course of a. few years
at the longest is the enamel of our teeth, and that is
why we have those two plagues of humanity, toothache
and dentists.

So it would seem that since we are not composed of
the same material we cannot be the same persons we
were years ago. According to this view no man ought
to be held to a contract longer than, say, seven years at
the most. If a man is arrested for a crime committed
ten years ago he can easily prove an alibi. He can
show that every particle which constituted the man who
did the deed has long since been dissipated and now
forms part of the air, the sea, and the soil. A man
never celebrates his silver, or even his tin, wedding
with the same woman he married. He may call her his

14 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

wife still, but he is really not married to any part of
her—except as I said, to her teeth, and perhaps those
are changed. Speaking from a materialistic standpoint
a couple ought to have the ceremony performed over
again every few years so as to stay married.

Why is it that these things, which are literally true,
seem to us so absurd? It is because there is a fallacy in
the idea. It is the fallacy of materialism. We know
we are the same persons we were last year and the years
before. Although we may have changed, it is not be-
cause we have new finger nails, new eyelashes, new
bones, new everything. ‘That did not change us. We
know that if every particle of our bodies were sud-
denly replaced by new particles of the same kind we
would not know the difference. We would be the same
persons. In other words the person is something quite
distinct from the matter which composes his body. It
is a different body, but the same man. It was Heracli-
tus, one of the earliest of the Greek philosophers, who
first saw this and said, ‘“‘The water changes, but the
river remains the same.”

We care nothing, really, for the particular atoms of
carbon, of hydrogen, of oxygen, of nitrogen, that make
up what we mistakenly call ourselves. Let them go.
We can get more; or if we cannot we do not want to
keep these longer. We are not attached to the matter
of which our bodies are composed. In the course of a
few weeks or months, what is a part of me may become
a part of you: “ ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave
to thousands.”

We see how foolish were the Egyptians, who be-
lieved that for a resurrection of the individual it was

MODERN EGYPTIANS 15

necessary to preserve intact the identical body of the
man who died; or, to speak more accurately, the last
of the many bodies which the man had in his lifetime.
They embalmed this body to prevent it from decaying,
they wrapped it in multitudinous folds of linen to pre-
vent it from being damaged, and built over it the pyra-
mids to shelter it from destruction. The character of
the protests against the disturbance of the Tutankh-
amen tomb shows that superstition still lingers.

Scarcely less grossly superstitious and materialistic
than the Egyptian is our own treatment of cast-off
bodies. We put them in elegant caskets to keep for
a few years the elements from being of further use to
the world. We transport them long distances that
their earth may mingle with the earth of some selected
spot. All this is antichristian in the extreme. If it is
true that matter composing the bodies of our dear ones
is sacred to us, we should not let it go to waste during
their lifetime. We should preserve in mahogany and
marble the breath, the hair, the nails, and all the ma-
terial which has formed part of those whom we love,
and has been cast away. From the standpoint of the
Bible our funeral customs are heathenish; from the
standpoint of science they are absurd and injurious;
yet in opposition to both we still cling to the supersti-
tions of materialism.

Our bodies do not belong to us; they are only rented,
and we are merely transitory tenants. Form is more
permanent than matter. The person persists while the
body disappears. At least, we know this is true while
we live, and we trust it is true when we die. Our bodies
are part of God’s modeling clay, which he is continually

16 CHEMISTRY OF GREATEST MIRACLE

shaping into new and more beautiful forms; never
throwing any of it away, never wasting it, never leaving
it long idle. The vain thought of the pyramid builders
that they would baffle God’s plan and prevent the clay,
which once formed the body of Cheops, from being
ever again of use has proved fruitless. The clay of the
great Pharaoh has passed through thousands of trans-
migrations in plant and animal and mineral, more won-
derful than the path of the soul described in the Egyp-
tian Book of the Dead, since it was first placed in what
the priests of the day called its “eternal habitation,”
the most substantial structure ever raised by the hand
of man, the Great Pyramid.

Continuously, in and out, over and under, circle the
elements; never at rest, never the same, all bent on the
mission appointed them before the creation of the
world. Never faltering, never deviating, each atom fol-
lows the path through empty space marked out for it
millions of years ago; a path so complex that no mathe-
matician can calculate it for the thousandth part of a
second, yet so regular that no variation can be detected
in years. Back and forth without stopping moves the
shuttle of matter, eternally weaving the living garment
of God. No eye can follow its swift movement, no
imagination can conceive it, but all that is, is what it
seems to be.

As Jacob on his pillow of stone saw in his vision a
ladder with angels ascending and descending on it, so
we, with our vision clarified by science, can see the
atoms as the angels, the messengers of Almighty God,
ascending and descending through the scale of life, now
carried about by the air, then washed down by the rain,

THE COMMONPLACE OF MIRACLE 17

then buried in the soil; then caught up by the hungry
rootlets and carried through the sap and stored in the
seed or the fruit; then rising to a fuller life in some
animal; then caught up and made part of the mecha-
nism of thought and feeling in man; then cast out with
the breath to begin again their wanderings; obedient to
God’s laws whether in high or low estate, equally doing
God’s service whether in the brain of a philosopher or
in the body of a microbe or buried in a rock, apparently
useless and forgotten for thousands of years. So for-
ever is repeated the miracle of the Garden of Eden
when God first formed man out of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life and man became a living soul.

I fear not Thy withdrawal; more I fear,
Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams
Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou,
Walking Thy garden sti'l, communest with men,
Missed in the commonplace of miracle.

LOWELL.

THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DAILY LIFE

Whether therefore ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all for
the glory of God—I Corinthians 10:31.

THERE are two ways of looking at life that are com-
mon and erroneous. One is the materialistic, in which
people are so absorbed in their daily cares and trials,
or in their sordid aims and schemes, that they never
have time nor inclination to look beyond them. They
spend their time raking over their own muck-heap with-
out ever so much as glancing upward. They love the
world, its work, and its pleasures. They smile incredu-
lously when we would tell them of another and a
spiritual world.

The other class, that may be called of nobler mind
than the first, are still mistaken in their view of life.
They know of the spiritual world and long to live in it
wholly. They have had the heavenly vision, and hence-
forth despise everything earthly. They have looked on
the sun, and their eyes are dazzled so that when they
look down to earth again it seems very dark and
gloomy. By contrast with their high ideals, the reali-
ties with which they are surrounded seem poor, cheap,
mean. Nothing earthly is worth while. All their ef-
forts are to escape from the world, and since they can-
not yet enter a higher they seek to separate themselves
from this one as far as possible, lest they become con-
taminated. Their conception of religion is as a sort of

ecstasy, lifting them out of their daily life; not helping
18

DAILY BREAD RELIGION 19

them in it. Everything religious must be kept sepa-
rate from everything secular. Religion put to practi-
cal use would be to them a degradation; like Pegasus
employed as a plow horse. Their religion must be in-
sulated from daily life lest it should leak away, like
electricity. Religion must be confined to a separate
place, special days, a different language, and particular
exercises. Now this latter class is far above the first.
They do see the spiritual, but they do not see its rela-
tion to the material. They have religion, but they
don’t use it. That is a great mistake; for that is what
religion is for. It is practical. It is intended for every-
day use. It is our daily bread, not a Sunday dinner.
It is not a means of escape from this miserable world,
but a way of living better in this world, and making it
less miserable. Religion is something to live by, not
merely to die by. It is primarily for this world, since a
large part of what goes to make up our religion will
probably be useless in another world, for instance,
almsgiving and churchgoing. The New Jerusalem is a
city without a church. Those whose religion is confined
to the church will not be at home in heaven.

Still the aim of a great many persons is to separate
religion as completely as possible from life. They have
done this in many ways.

First, by confining religion to certain individuals.
Finding it impracticable for all to live according to
their ideals, amid the struggles and temptations of ac-
tive life, it was decided better that a few should be re-
lieved of these struggles and temptations in order to
develop the higher life undisturbed, rather than that
piety should perish from the earth. So some of the

20 THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DAILY LIFE

early Christians became hermits in the deserts or on
mountain tops or pillars. It was the monastic idea.
They were called “The Religious” and had nothing to
do but be good and to pray for those who had not their
spiritual opportunities. ‘The idea is well expressed in
a French book I was reading recently, in which the
monasteries were called the lightning rods of the coun-
try. They averted the wrath of Heaven just as ten
righteous men would have saved Sodom. But it was
found in the Middle Ages that this isolation of a re-
ligious class results in extravagant and useless piety on
their part, and that the populace, deprived of associa-
tion with the more spiritual-minded members, became
ignorant and immoral. The double standard of moral-
ity is a mistake. But in our conception of the office of
the minister we keep much of the old feeling. We hire
a pastor to do our religion for us. We look upon min-
isters as forming a class with other ethics and other
duties than ours. Now it is, indeed, advisable that we
distinguish by title and position those who have spent
years in definite ethical work and study, and who have
been deemed worthy to teach by persons of authority
having the interests of God’s kingdom at heart. Such
men should be distinguished from others, however wise
and good, who have not had this training and indorse-
ment, just as the law requires a man to have studied
medicine before he may call himself “doctor.”

But there is no law of God that does not apply
equally to minister and layman. If the minister is
more strictly moral than his parishioners, as he gen-
erally is, it is not because he is under any obligation to
be so. Paying a man to be good for you is as bad as

ALL SORTS OF PUPILS 21

paying a man to do your praying for you. You might
as well hire a man to breathe for you. Neither does
contributing to the support of a minister relieve you
from the duty of active religious work. That is laid
upon all Christians alike. It may relieve you from the
necessity of public and formal preaching, but the most
effective preaching is not always done from the pulpit.
It is done in the street, the shop, the schoolroom, to
an audience of one or two, and from all sorts of texts.
That ministry we can delegate to no one.

Neither can you hire a minister to do your thinking
for you. Every group of Christians should have a man
of technical theological training; it is a safeguard
against religious fads and fanaticism. The church is
right in insisting upon an educated ministry. But,
after all, every one has to construct for himself his
own theology. That is the prerogative of the Protes-
tant, for which our fathers fought and suffered. It is
the duty of the layman to devote what time he can to
the study of religion in order to form intelligent opin-
ions. This needs some insisting upon nowadays, as
laymen are neglecting the study of theology.

Another way of separating religion from life is to
confine it to special days. It has been found necessary
to a high civilization that certain days be set aside, by
mutual consent, in which the hurry and worry of busi-
ness shall cease and an opportunity be afforded for the
cultivation of the higher life. As in the Middle Ages,
when war was perpetually waged, the Popes at times
declared a “Truce of God,” when no fighting was al-
lowed, so we each week declare a “truce of God” dur-
ing which our industrial warfare shall be suspended.

22 THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DAILY LIFE

The Jews dedicated Saturday to this purpose, the Chris-
tians Sunday, the Mohammedans Friday. These days
were established, in part, as anniversaries, as we have
the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Armistice Day,
to commemorate our great wars.

But just as there are people who confine their pa-
triotism to the Fourth of July, so some persons keep
their religion in their Sunday clothes. Devotion on
any other day seems to them incongruous, if not sacri-
legious. The Sabbath is not an institution of theoretical
theology, but of practical religion. Its value lies in its
use. ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man
for the Sabbath.” That is, man keeps the Sabbath for
his own benefit, not to glorify the institution, or to
commemorate the creation or the resurrection of Christ.
Keeping the Sabbath and going to church are not vir- ©
tues in themselves, but means used for the cultivation
of virtue.

Then there are those who separate religion from life
by confining it to particular places and ceremonies, who
believe that a prayer said in a church reaches God more
surely than one said in the workshop; that a certain
spot of ground or building must be used for religious
service; that particular kinds of clothing, music, in-
tonation, find special favor in the sight of God by rea-
son of some mysterious fitness quite apart from their
appropriateness to the devotional mood, or the reli-
gious associations connected with them. Under the in-
fluence of a sixteen-foot organ pipe, one may easily
mistake the palpitation of his diaphragm for the shiver-
ing of his soul.

We are all inclined to separate religion from life by

IN A STRANGE TONGUE 23

giving it a special vocabulary of its own. Religious
phraseology is conservative because we dislike to
change those forms of speech with which our deepest
thoughts and emotions are intimately connected. The
emotions are the foundation of religion, are most easily
controlled through association, and this is dependent
upon fixed forms. But the language of everyday life
changes, and so, in time, it comes to pass that we have
two languages, a sacred and a secular, hieroglyphic and
demotic. This would not matter so much if all were
brought up in the church; but they are not. The ma-
jority of the people in our country do not understand
this “church language.”” That is one reason, I think,
why preaching fails to reach and move those who have
not been trained in the church. We talk to them in a
foreign tongue. The greatest revival on record was on
the Day of Pentecost: that was when every man heard
preaching in his own tongue, wherein he was born.

We may think this an insignificant matter, but that
is because we, who have heard and used this language
from childhood, do not realize how strange and un-
familiar it sounds to the world outside, nor how repel-
lent even a slight quaintness of phraseology is to the
average man. The popular distaste for poetry and sci-
ence is because both make use of an unfamiliar vocabu-
Jary. Read some of our hymns, or listen to sermons,
with a view to seeing how they would strike you if you
were not accustomed to the religious vocabulary, and
had no associations with the words. How much of it
would you understand, or be attracted by?

There is a group of artists who paint modern scenes
with Christ introduced as one of the characters, eating

24 THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DAILY LIFE

at the table of a poor mechanic, in blouse and overalls,
or healing the sick in a city hospital. Dagnan-Bouveret
and L’Hermitte so present Christ in modern settings.
The artists of the Renaissance painted Christ in this
way, surrounded by their own friends and neighbors.
Now, however incongruous this may be from an artis-
tic or historic standpoint, it is religiously correct. Every
well informed person believes in the historical Christ;
but Christians believe also in the Christ of today.
What we need is to get a correct idea of what Christ
was to his contemporaries, and then imagine what he
would do if he were living now. Not Jesus the Jew
of nineteen hundred years ago, transferred bodily to
our midst, but in the form in which he would appear,
if he came on earth today, a modern man, without a
trace of the antique or outlandish in language, dress, or
bearing. In so far as we can realize that, we are Chris-
tians knowing Christ.

We can realize Christ as a God in heaven more easily
than as a man in the world, especially in our modern
world. We cannot comprehend the real incarnation;
how the Word which we reverence could become flesh
which we despise; how the New Jerusalem can descend
upon this filthy earth. This mingling of the divine and
the human baffles our comprehension. We are slow to
understand that by these metaphors is meant not a
degradation of the divine, but an elevation of the hu-
man; the spiritualization of daily life. The unique
thing about Jesus was that his religion was a
part of his daily life. Others have preached, perhaps
as eloquently; none has lived so eloquently as he. His
position on earth was not so different from ours as we

SERMONS IN STONES 25

sometimes think. He was not a priest nor minister, in
the modern sense. He did not baptize, did not even
have a church, did not preach regularly. He simply
went about doing good; teaching informally, casually,
when there was opportunity, helping people out of
trouble, denouncing wrong when he thought it would
do any good. Just what we all have a chance of doing;
just what we all should do.

Even his mighty powers were applied to such pur-
poses as we should apply our lesser ability. The
miracles related of him were never spectacular, nor pre-
arranged. They were merely helpful and casual; pro-
viding a lunch on the hills when the people were tired
and hungry, assisting fishermen who were out of luck,
going into the kitchen to help a perplexed and embar-
rassed housewife when the wine ran low—pure friend-
liness and neighborliness. |

He preached, yes, but as willingly from a well-curb
as from a pulpit. He took a text from the Scriptures
sometimes, but more often from field and orchard. He
saw “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones, and good in every thing.” There is
usually some one ready to criticize a modern preacher
who follows this example. Christ’s favorite place for
meditation was among the hills and groves. He did
not often go into the temple to pray, but rather to the
olive grove. Now there is nothing sacred about olive
trees. It is a Palestinian equivalent to our apple or-
chard. No special place, no stated time, no formal
phrases were sacred to him; all was equally sacred.

The aim of Christ was not to establish a religion for
recluses, nor to introduce a new ritual. It was to spir-

26 THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DAILY LIFE

itualize daily life. There are two acts closely connected
with our animal natures: eating and washing. I have
heard people object to eating and drinking in public,
asserting that such processes, as is already the case with’
cleansing of the person, should be carried on in private,
Byron could not endure seeing a woman eat. Marcus
Aurelius felt that he had reached the height of pan-
theism when he was no longer disgusted at the sight of
dirty bath water. Now, it is these two necessary but
vulgar acts that Christ chose to show forth the highest
spiritual truths, and which have become the chief cere-
monials of the church. Baptism is symbolic washing;
the washing of the body to represent the purification of
the heart. The communion service is symbolic eating
and drinking; to represent our daily dependence on
God for our spiritual as well as our material food.
These acts that God hath cleansed let not man call
common or unclean.

Whether Christ intended eating the bread and drink-
ing the fruit of the vine, and washing of the disciples’
feet to be ritualistic practices of the future church is a
point on which doctors disagree, and which therefore
it would be unbecoming, even unsafe, for a layman to
discuss. It is of no practical importance, anyway, or
Christ would have been explicit. What he evidently
did mean is very generally overlooked—to make every
meal a memorial. It was a consecration, not of the par-
ticular food eaten by the twelve, or that officially
blessed in church, but of all food partaken of by his
followers. ‘For as often as ye eat this bread and drink
this cup’’—that is, whenever we partake of the articles
of daily diet—‘tye do show forth the Lord’s death.”

GRACE BEFORE KISSING cf

Whenever we eat we are to remember that we receive
from the same source our spiritual nourishment. There
is nothing peculiarly sacred about bread and wine.
They might have been potatoes and tea if these had
been known then in Palestine. ‘Whether, therefore, ye
eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of
God.”

Sacred days, sacred places, sacred words, are easy
to get and keep. What we have not but ought to have is
a sacred everyday life. Let us not keep our religious
life separate from our ordinary life. Let us mix them.
We are not, indeed, always in the same mood; some-
times we are sad, sometimes gay; sometimes serious,
sometimes frivolous. But these moods are not irreli-
gious, and we need never part company with religion
in them. We are not always inclined to ponder upon
the deeper problems of life and destiny, nor is it desira-
ble that we should be; this is not the whole of religion.
But we should not go where we cannot take God with
us; nor do anything upon which we cannot ask his
blessing.

We may ask God’s blessing upon the gayest feast.
Charles Lamb said he felt more inclined to give thanks
when he opened a new book than when he sat down at
the table. He would be quite right in doing so. There
is a story told of a Puritan divine who asked a blessing
and returned thanks before and after receiving the
first kiss from his sweetheart. If that strikes us as
ludicrous the fault is with us, not with the divine. Ifa
man cannot combine his religion and his love-making,
it indicates that the one or the other is of the wrong
kind.

28 THE SPIRITUALIZATION OF DAILY LIFE

We are not purely physical nor spiritual, but a com-
pound of both, and we must submit to our conditions.
Browning in a beautiful simile, too long to quote, repre-
sents man as a swimmer immersed in the water and
supported by it—as we are supported by the material
world—but he can get his head up into a purer and
finer atmosphere to breathe. As soon, however, as he
struggles to leave the water, he sinks beneath the sur-
face instead. So, in order to breathe the air, he must
remain in the water.

We must learn to use both the spiritual and the
material, to see the divine meaning in nature. We need
greater faith in God; not a distant God, distant in time
or in space, but a God who is not far from any one of
us; for in him we live and move and have our being,
apart from whom we are literally nothing. We must
believe in the Immanent God, great enough to hold the
world in its orbit, and great enough to teach the tad-
pole how to swim; a God who does not keep himself
apart from this world which we call bad, but which he
created and called good. We need the faith that sees
God, not only in the miraculous, but in the common-
place; in the rain and the dew as well as in the thunder
and the whirlwind; which sees “every common bush
afire with God.”

So many people have tried their hand at a definition
of religion, that I also will attempt it. Religion is the
perpetual realization of God; the spiritualization of
daily life.

Christ would not pray that his disciples be taken
from the world, but that they might be sanctified in the

HIS KINGDOM ON EARTH 29

world, working each at daily, trivial tasks, to the end
that his kingdom should come and his will be done on
earth as it is in heaven: aiming to make

Our common daily life divine,
And every land a Palestine.

THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven,
which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the
whole was leavened—Luke 13: 20-21.

THE complaint is often made that the work of the
church is being taken from it by the state and kindred
organizations. The statement has some justification;
the complaint has none. One of the functions of the
church is to discover new duties, to develop new and
startling extensions of old ethical principles, to apply
them, and to teach them to the world as a whole.

In business circles the man who fills this office is
called the promoter. He is a man well endowed with
the commercial imagination, who has a deeper insight
into conditions and possibilities, who discovers new
openings in business, who starts new enterprises, dem-
onstrates their practicability, and places them on a
sound financial basis.

What the promoter is in the business world the
church is in the ethical world. It has been and should
always be the pioneer, the innovator. By the church
aggressive I mean, of course, that minority, that very
small minority, which, led by religious zeal, undertakes
tasks which seem to the world foolishness—for the first
few hundred years. That any person should devote his
life to the care of the sick and the permanently dis-
abled; that buildings should be erected where the blind,

the deaf, and the insane are housed and well treated;
30

CHRISTIAN PIONEERING 31

that defenseless women and children should be given
a protecting refuge; that the criminal should find sanc-
tuary; all these appeared very strange and vain pro-
ceedings when they were novelties. Now every civ-
ilized state provides for them on an elaborate and ex-
pensive scale as part of its ordinary duties. Asylums
and hospitals, reformatories and humane prisons, all
such were started by a few men of aspiration and in-
spiration in the face of ridicule and contempt, but are
now maintained as a matter of course by ordinary men
with no higher ideals than the average. Numerous fra-
ternal and benevolent societies, sometimes composed
and controlled by men who are not at all religious, are
doing very efficiently the kind of work which was once
confined to persons of exceptionally altruistic nature.
The church is not designed to do all the good work of
the world, but merely to show how it should be done,
and the more it can get out of those not in sympathy
with its newer and higher ideals the better. The great-
est captains of war and industry have been those who
could get others to do most of what they wanted done.

It is not only in religious matters that the church has
been the leader. The world laughed at the church for
centuries because it hoarded books and wasted the time
of those devoted to its service in copying and studying
the writings of the Greeks and the Romans. Instead
of cultivating the ancient and honorable profession of
fighting, these deluded creatures illuminated manu-
scripts, painted walls and composed music. But finally’
when the time came, art, drama, music, and architecture
burst from the monastic cell as a butterfly from its
chrysalis, spreading its beautiful wings in the open.

32 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

Schools and colleges are now supported by all the
people. Everybody, whether fond of reading or not,
recognizes the usefulness of printing presses and libra-
ries. Once it was only the fanatical missionary who
took any interest in anthropology, who noted the lan-
guage of barbarous races, observed their customs and
preserved their primitive mythology. Now we have
bureaus of ethnology and societies devoted to the study
of folklore. It was the church which first recorded and
regulated marriage; now it is done by the state. Even
our form of representative government, with its unique
harmonizing of unity and adaptability, is a gift from
canon law to civil law. The idea of internationalism,
the conception of the brotherhood of all men, was a
religious innovation, which now many secular agencies
are striving to put into effect. Most of the arts and
several of the sciences had their origin in religion,
though both arts and sciences are apt to forget their
ancestry.

The church has often fiercely objected to this taking
over by other organizations of its peculiar functions
just when they become most profitable and fashionable,
but this protest was wrong and useless as well. Ideas
cannot be patented, and no form of trust can monopo-
lize good deeds. The church must not object to rivals,
nor expend much energy in getting credit for what it
has done, but must go on conquering new fields, and
So prove its reason for existence.

For the church as a leader there is more demand
than ever before; for the church as a follower there is
no vacancy. As a duplicator, as a drag, the church
looks sadly out of place; but a church with imagination,

THE ETHICAL INVENTOR 33

with ideals, will make its own place. The moral world
is not finite; there are always new lands, new conti-
nents, to discover. The world will not listen to a church
which has only platitudes to teach; truths which every-
body accepts, however little they may be practiced.
When the world on the whole approves of what the
church is doing it is a sign that the world has caught
up with the church and it is time for the church to take
a step in advance.

As it may shock some, who have not thought about
the matter, to have it suggested that there can be any
progress in ethics, and that the highest morality does
not consist in following conventional precepts and prac-
tices but sometimes involves a departure from the
mores, from the mode and manner of the time, I will
quote a passage from The Alchemy of Thought, by Dr.
L. P. Jacks, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford,
and editor of the Hibbert Journal, for it contains the
best elucidation of this point that I have ever read:

We are apt to believe that great good will be done by
inculcating the precept “Imitate the Good Samaritan.”
That some good will be done by the mere repetition of this
precept at appropriate times and by duly qualified persons
need not be doubted; at the same time it is equally certain
that much harm will be done by exaggerating the good
which this precept can do. Nothing, in fact, could better
illustrate the limitations of fatuous morality and the dan-
gers of forgetting them. For how are we to imitate the
Good Samaritan, and what would imitation of him really
involve? The splendid thing about the Good Samaritan
was that he refused to imitate anybody. Had his morality
been of the imitative order he would have done after the

34 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

manner of the Priest and the Levite, who were actually
following approved exemplars of their time and place. So
long, indeed, as our deeds of charity are mere imitations
of somebody else, no matter of whom, the principle of our
conduct is far nearer to that of the Priest and the Levite
than to that of the Good Samaritan. When he showed
mercy on the wounded man he was not imitating another
Good Samaritan who had done the same thing on a pre-
vious occasion; nor was he remembering some precept
which had been drilled into him by the masters of his
youth or the pastors of his manhood. He was the first.
His action, far from giving effect to any fixed rule that
might have been taught him by contemporary moralists,
was a flat violation of the respectable moral opinion of
that time and place. A person who assists a wounded man
today and thinks he is thereby imitating the Good Sa-
maritan is therefore making a mistake, which, though it
may flatter his self-conceit, vitiates his moral judgment.
To do this act for the first time, in defiance of the accepted
traditions of your race, is one thing; to do it for the ten
thousandth time with the felt approval of the world at your
back, is another thing. In no relevant sense is the second
an imitation of the first. All the “subjective” factors of
the two situations are different. Our pleasant conscious-
ness that this kind of conduct has been sanctioned by the
highest authority, ratified by the moral judgment of ages,
celebrated in art, proved sound in principle by science, and
commended by the most illustrious philosophers—need it
be said that of all this there was no faintest glimmer in
the mind of the Good Samaritan? In place of it there
was, I suspect, an uncomfortable feeling that if his best
friends saw that he was after they would cut him for-
ever.

How, then, can we imitate the Good Samaritan? We
imitate him, not by reproducing his act, but by being just

THE PHARISAIC PUBLICAN 35

as original, just as creative, just as indifferent towards
fatuous morality as he was.

If rules for imitating the Good Samaritan are to be
framed and “taught” by way of moral education either to
children or adults, these rules must take the form of telling
us how to be morally original. And this, it will be ad-
mitted, is impossible.

The point is sufficiently important to deserve a second
illustration from the same source. Were one asked to de-
scribe the most odious form of hypocrisy conceivable, we
should surely point to the man who deliberately repro-
duces the part of the Publican in the parable and deliber-
ately abjures that of the Pharisee—the man who says in-
wardly, “I thank thee, O God, that I am not as yonder
Pharisee. I don’t fast twice a week; I don’t give tithes
of all I possess, but duly, and at the proper time, I smite
upon my breast and cry, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’
The splendid thing about the Publican—and here he re-
sembles the Good Samaritan—was that he smote upon his
breast before any authority had laid it down that this was
the correct thing for a man in his position to do. Surely
we are well advised in not imitating the Publican; even
fatuous morality would shrink from such advice, though
what other advice it can give is hard to say.

The problem of the church is the same as that of a
government, that is, how to secure minority rights with-
out surrendering majority rule. Progress comes only
through minorities. Whenever a new idea comes into
the world it has a majority of 1,750,000,000 against it,
for a new idea comes into the mind of one man first. If
they are actively hostile or inertly indifferent the new
idea is crushed out or dies out before it gets a start.
To follow Pope’s rule,

36 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,

would absolutely put a stop to all progress.

Yet ninety-nine per cent of all the new ideas that
come into the head of the wisest man are wrong and
deserve to die in infancy. The question is to find out
which one is fit to survive. The majority is always
wrong in regard to the one particular minority that
holds the better view, yet the majority is always right
in regard to most of the various other and divergent
views.

“New truths begin as heresies and end as supersti-
tions,’’ says Huxley, and that applies to science, poli-
tics, and religion equally. ‘‘New occasions teach new
duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,” says Lowell,
so ethics must continually progress to keep up with the
advance of the world. That does not mean the repudi-
ation of former principles or the loss of earlier gains.
Comparing a textbook on chemistry or biology today
with one of fifty years ago, you would hardly think
that they dealt with the same science. You might
suppose that the slate had been wiped clean of all the
old, but if you look more closely you will see that all
the old facts have been incorporated in the new theo-
ries and that surprisingly few of the old statements have
been found to be so false that they had to be discarded.
Science grows like a snowball, englobing what has
gone before.

Science is by definition established truth, yet it is
continually undergoing disestablishment. Science is
never so sure of itself as when it is changing its mind.

IS THE CHURCH LEADING? 37

Scientists have two functions in the world; to conserve
and to discover, to hold on to what has been gained and
to reach out for something new. The two tasks fall
naturally to men of different temperaments, the first
to teachers and the second to investigators; rarely
does a man excel equally in both.

The history of religion seems to me to resemble the
history of science, both in its method of progress and
in the two types of temperament. Happy is the church
that can keep its priest and prophets within its fold and
working with reasonable harmony for its advancement.

Some years ago, when I was on the editorial staff of
the Independent, we asked our readers to vote on the
question of who were the greatest living Americans,
who were the most valuable men among our contem-
poraries, the real leaders of the nation? In canvassing
the ballots I was surprised to find that out of more
than a thousand votes, widely scattered among many
nominees, there were only three clergymen named, and
these had very few votes, although the subscribers of
the periodical were mostly church members. I think
it safe to say that never at any time in the history of
the country from the landing of the Pilgrims to the
death of Phillips Brooks would a referendum of this
sort have had such a result. This seems to indicate, so
far as it goes, that the leaders of thought and action
today are not found in the ministry so much as for-
merly.

Professor Van Tyne of the University of Michigan
has for years been delving into the origin of the
American Revolution and he finds it chiefly in the non-
conformist churches. Seventy-five per cent of the pa-

38 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

triots who attained distinction enough to leave bio-
graphical data were Congregationalists and Presby-
terians. The sentiments and phrases that were em-
bodied in the resolutions and speeches of the revolu-
tionists were, he finds, taken directly from sermons.
Where did Patrick Henry get his radical opinions and
fiery language? Why, from his pastor. The outburst
of anti-monarchical sentiment, the challenge of the di-
vine right of kings, the assertion of the natural right
of the people to govern themselves, the language and
ideas that so astonished the ruling classes of England,
were familiar folk-phrases to the Americans. The revo-
lution consisted mostly in carrying into effect what
they had been taught from the pulpit.

Now, we may safely assume that some other revolu-
tion is at the present time in the process of incubation,
some movement that will change the course of our
history as much as did the separation from the Eng-
lish crown, though I would not presume to say what
it will be, or even guess whether it will be in the field
of politics, industry, social life, economics, education,
ethics, or religion. But what I want to know is whether
the historian who writes about that revolution in the
future will be able to find it forecast in the sermons of
today. Will he find that the preachers of the present
were the prophets of the better order of things which we
trust will be the outcome of the next great change,
whatever it may be? Will their pulpit utterances be-
come the slogans of the coming reformation?

In the intellectual crisis of the present, which comes
from the sudden influx of novel and unassimilated facts
and theories from scientific research, we are not getting

THEOLOGIANS WANTED 39

the help that we have a right to expect from those who
now occupy our pulpits, and I fear that we shall get
still less from their successors. For, either from lack
of taste or from defect of training, the graduates from
our best theological seminaries do not seem to be con-
cerned with such questions. The theological students
I meet nowadays are good fellows, earnest, energetic,
devout, ambitious, and liberal-minded. They seem to
be smartly up-to-date and keenly alive on all topics but
one, and that is theology. Most of them do not seem to
have any or any interest in any. By theology I do not
mean a particular system of dogmatic doctrine but
rather the habit of thinking about the fundamentals of
faith and reason, about the metaphysics that lie at the
base of physics, the psychology that controls character
and motivation, the personal philosophy that is the
compass of conduct. It is the schools of science, not
the schools of theology, that are turning out the thinkers
in such fields.

We are in the midst of the greatest revolution of
thought that the world has ever seen, the Einstein
theory of relativity, the Planck theory of quanta, the
chromosome theory of heredity, the hormone theory of
temperament, the new knowledge of the constitution
of the universe and of the workings of the human mind.
These ideas will influence the philosophy, theology,
religion, and morals of the future as much as the Coper-
nican theory influenced those of the sixteenth century,
and the Darwinian theory, of the nineteenth. Such
questions would have aroused the keenest interest in
the minds of men like Edwards, Berkeley, Calvin,
Aquinas, Augustine, or Paul. They would have

40 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

delighted to work out their ethical implications. A
student of engineering or biology will sit up half the
night discussing these theories, and their application to
life, but your modern theological graduate is bored by
them. He has learned how to give the glad hand to the
strangers at the church door and can teach Boy Scouts
how they should salute the flag—things that a pump-
handle or drill-sergeant could do as well—but he is not
qualified to lead his people through the mazes of modern
thought. Since sermons have become sociological in-
stead of philosophical, serious-minded people are going
elsewhere to get their metaphysics and often getting a
poor brand of it from unqualified dispensers. When a
young preacher does touch upon such topics—which
fortunately is seldom—he is apt to reveal a materialis-
tic conception of matter that sounds amusingly anti-
quated to his scientific hearers.

The Committee of Inquiry on “The Teaching Office
of the Church” appointed by the Archbishops of the
Church of England, admitting “the failure of the church
to obtain a hearing for its message,” ascribed it pri-
marily to the fault of the theological teaching. The
Committee on Evangelistic Work reported that “if the
Church is to preach to this generation an evangel that
will grip, it must come in some real sense as ‘news’;
news powerful enough to change the whole mental and
spiritual outlook.”

If the church is to be anything more than the Boost-
ers’ Club of Zenith City there has got to be some hard
thinking done by those at the head of it during the next
twenty years. Somebody has got to seize hold of these
new conceptions and point out their moral applica-

PRIESTS AND PROPHETS 4]

tions. Otherwise somebody else will make immoral
applications of them. Unless the preacher gets accus-
tomed to deep diving while he is young, he is apt to
swim shallower and shallower as he gets on in life.
Unless he has once thought things through for himself
he will be at the mercy of every passing fad that blows.
Theological schools ought to teach theology.

Eloquence of tongue and charm of manner will not
compensate for want of thought. In time any congre-
gation will tire of a diet exclusively of boneless sermons
stewed in cream.

The living church must have its school of prophets as
well as its caste of priests; its innovators as well as its
conservators. Among the ancient Hebrews priest and
prophet were quite distinct, and indeed often at odds.
The modern minister is expected to combine the two
functions, which is difficult if not impossible, for they
require different types of temperament. The priest is
the official guardian of the established church. He
conducts its ceremonies, manages its finances, maintains
its traditions. It is his duty to transmit to each succes-
sive generation the winnowed wisdom of the fathers,
to see that no accent of the Holy Ghost is lost by this
heedless world.

The prophet is a man of different character and other
duty. It is his task to arouse the people against unsus-
pected sins, to sting them from their apathy and pre-
vent formalism from putting the church to sleep, to
apply the eternal principles of righteousness to present
crises, to point out the consequences of prevailing or
proposed policies, and raise new standards of ethics.
He is the radical, the agitator, the nonconformist, the

42 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

iconoclast. He does not appeal to tradition; he does
not rely upon the law or cite precedent. He speaks as
one having authority, and not as the scribes. But al-
though he may denounce the established church of his
time as an obstacle to progress, yet he builds upon it
for the foundation of his new order and must in turn
establish some institution of the sort to make his mes-
sage a permanent power in the world.

We find a similar differentiation of function in other
fields: in politics, where we find the spellbinder, who is
sent around the country in the campaign, and the dis-
trict leader, who knows his ward man by man and
keeps the machine running between campaigns; in
science, where the original genius absorbed in research
must be supplemented by the teacher who is as much
interested in his students as he is in his subject.

In the modern Protestant churches the two func-
tions and types are distinguished, rather imperfectly,
by the terms pastor and preacher. The priest, or pas-
tor, should be a man who is esteemed and loved by all.
He should be the guide, philosopher, and friend of
young and old. It is more important that his judgment
should be sound than that his ideas should be original.
It is not necessary, and perhaps not desirable, that he
be a genius, unless a genius in common sense and friend-
liness. We go to his study, not to have epigrammatic
eloquence fired at us, but to receive commonplace con-
solation for our commonplace sorrows and common-
place correction for our commonplace sins. He must
be preéminently a practical man, able to manage the
business affairs of the church. He must conduct the
services of the church with a dignity and propriety all

RADIO FOR MODERN PROPHETS 43

the more required where the ritual is simple and flexible.
He must know his people, their home life, their busi-
ness life, their spiritual life. He must have the ability
of a general or captain of industry to be able to set
each man and especially each woman where he or she
can do the most good.

The prophet, or preacher, may be lacking in some or
all these virtues and yet be capable of doing a great
work in the world. It is a pity for a man of eloquence
and insight to be put out of the pulpit because his books
do not balance or he cannot remember whether the
Smith child is a boy or girl. There are so many people
in the world who can balance books and remember the
names of the Smith children, and so few who can inspire
and stimulate us. The preacher of the Prophetic type
must make bitter enemies as well as devoted disciples,
as he handles live issues without gloves. He is apt
to be touchy and temperamental. Carlyle was a typical
prophet and he was, on the best authority, ‘‘gey ill to
live wi’. And no matter how great his genius, the
preacher cannot be relied upon to turn out annually
fifty-two or one hundred and four sermons of equal
originality and eloquence. Four new ones a year is as
much as we have a right to expect from any man.

For that reason it is not fair to confine the great
preacher to one pulpit, even in a city where he preaches
to a procession. To get the best out of both the pas-
tors should be permanent and the preachers peripatetic.
Perhaps the radio will prove to be the solution to this
old problem. By this means we may listen to the best
preachers of any denomination, or of none, either in-
dividually or collectively, while the local pastor stops

44 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER |

trying to compete with them and confines himself to
the ministry of his flock.

The fault I have to find with the preachers is that
they are too unselfish and self-effacing. The modern
minister is willing to sacrifice to the desires of others,
not only himself, but the best interests of his church.
He will allow ‘the enrichment of the service” to the
point of intellectual impoverishment. He may still sit
upon the platform but can hardly be said to occupy the
‘pulpit. He does not even get as much of a chance to
talk as a toastmaster at a banquet. And if the choir
wants to display a special anthem he will obligingly cut
down his sermon from twenty to thirteen and a half
minutes, or omit it altogether.

He will surrender his best chance at systematic in-
struction, the adult Bible class, to a fluent realtor, law-
yer, or storekeeper, who has no training in what he
undertakes to teach. Now a devout layman of this sort
may be able to contribute mightily to the education of
the congregation by the lessons in practical ethics that
he has derived from his observation and experience in
the world of affairs, but it must make a minister miser-
able to hear him misinterpret Scripture, misrepresent
historical circumstances, and misconstrue theological
questions that have been studied for centuries.

People think they are cheated unless a lecturer gives
them at least an hour and a quarter. A university pro-
fessor has fifty-five minutes to devote to the elucidation
of a single point. The preacher, who has more intri-
cate and more vital themes to expound and impress,
should have at least as long. It is a practical impossibil-
ity to explain and develop a subject in its proper pro-

BIBLE READING WITHOUT COMMENT 45

portions in a quarter of an hour. In the days when
sermons were a power in the life of our people the
preacher measured his remarks by an hourglass on the
pulpit, and turned it over if he found he needed more
time to do justice to his topic and his congregation.

The consequence of this relinquishment by the mod-
ern preacher of the essential part of his job is that most
grown-up Christians nowadays have no grown-up re-
ligion. The childish ideas and forms that they learned
—perhaps—in the home or Sunday School are not ade-
quate to meet the intellectual difficulties and moral
temptations of after life. Naturally they come to think
that there is nothing to religion more than what they
were taught in childhood.

I call the educational the essential part of the
preacher’s job, because he is the only person in the
church who is qualified and trained to do it. Other
members of the congregation can visit newcomers and
even console the sick. Theological training is not nec-
essary to manage the organization and finances. Any
layman can baptize in an emergency. A justice of the
peace can marry. But probably there is no one in the
church who knows so much about the Bible, the his-
tory of the church, the principles of theology and the
applications of ethics. There is no use having an
educated minister if you do not make use of his edu-
cation.

The practice or legal requirement of reading pas-
sages of the Bible in the schools without comment is
supposed by some of its advocates and opponents to be
a Puritanical custom. On the contrary it would have
shocked the Puritans, who required their ministers to

46 THE CHURCH AS A PROMOTER

expound the chapter section by section as they read.
“This form of Scripture-reading was deemed the only
fitting method by the New England pastors, ‘dumb-
reading,’ or reading without comment, being supposed
to savor of the liturgical usages from which they had
fled.”* If a minister does not give this aid in the
understanding of the Biblical lesson we might as well
have a phonograph in the pulpit.

In comparing the pictures of New York City as it was
fifty years ago with the New York of to-day the most
striking difference is in the sky-line. Then the homes
and buildings were all low, only a few stories, and the
most prominent edifices were the churches, which raised
their spires high above all the rest. Nowadays in a
view of the city the churches are almost out of sight,
hidden away as they are between and behind the office
skyscrapers and apartment houses. A stranger judg-
ing by this picture would say that the churches had
sunk into insignificance.

But that would be wrong. The churches are there,
more of them than ever, larger than ever, busier than
ever; only they are less conspicuous. They have no
longer the monopoly of the heavenward impulse. They
no longer dominate the city, and they may more easily
be overlooked. |

The problem of the church is how to make the
best of the situation and how to maintain religion as a
vital factor in modern life when it has ceased to be the
most prominent. This is not necessarily an unfavorable
condition of affairs for religious progress. When we

1 Williston Walker, History of the Congregational Churches in
the United States, p. 238.

ROOM AT THE TOP 47

look back over the history of Christianity we find most
to regret and apologize for in the times when the church
occupied a commanding position and brooked no ri-
valry, while the periods when the pure spirit of Chris-
tianity was most manifest were those in which the
church was relatively less conspicuous. ‘The church
does not now suffer from any form of persecution, nor
does it offer such worldly advantages as to draw to it
the selfish and ambitious. Freed, then, on the one
hand from dangers of malice and envy and on the
other from the greater danger of becoming the tool of
secular powers, it has the opportunity of developing in
accordance with its own inner ideals and of achieving
its own peculiar aims.

Since the church has been largely relieved of the
educational and eleemosynary burdens, which it for-
merly had to bear alone, it may again become the
pioneer, pressing forward into unexplored territory and
gaining higher ground. If the church is crowded out
from its previous occupations, there is always room at
the top.

PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another,
God dwelleth in us... Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the
Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God—John 4:12, 15.

Once a little girl was observed sitting on the floor
furiously drawing a picture with colored crayons on a
big sheet of cardboard. Her mother asked her: “What
are you doing?”

The little girl answered: “I am drawing a picture of
God.”

The shocked mother remonstrated: “But nobody
knows how God looks.”

The little girl wet her crayon in her mouth and
dashed it again at the paper as she replied: ‘They will
when I get through.”

Here as usual the child reflects in miniature the child-
hood of the race. The prehistoric cave-dweller, who
daubed his deity on the rough rock walls in charcoal
and red ocher, had the same confidence in his ability
to portray the unseen object of his adoration and got
much the same result.

And all through the centuries since, men have never
ceased in their efforts to depict and describe their ideas
of divinity, to confine infinitude in the finite form.
Looking back over the pictorial evolution of theology
we should discern in the background the African fetish;
the meteorite fallen from heaven and the fulgurite

formed by the thunderbolt; the Egyptian dung beetle
48

SEEKERS AFTER GOLD 49

and cat-headed goddess; Pheenician Baal and Astarte,
divinities of cruelty and lust; Hindu Kali with her
necklace of human skulls and Siva with his obscene
emblems; Buddha of the lotus flower and Allah of the
sword; the many-breasted Diana of the Ephesians and
Briareus of the hundred arms; the human, all too hu-
man, gods of the Greeks and Romans; the paternal
and maternal elements of the Christian iconography;
the abstractions of the metaphysicians, the ineffable
visions of the mystics, the mathematical formule of
the men of science.

This composite picture, as we decipher it from the
palimpsest of the past, reminds us of the sketches that
we see in the museum, where the artist has retained
every pencil mark that he has made from the first vague
outlines to the finishing touches, each limb surrounded
with a haze of false drawing, of strokes astray; but
out of them has gradually emerged the final form. So
man works over the canvas on which he is drawing the
picture of God, all races, generation after generation,
adding new lines, erasing wrong lines, here a little,
there a little, revising, rectifying, improving as his
vision clears and his ideal develops. It is “the method
of trial and error,” by which the artist, the scientist,
and the theologian gradually approach the truth.

Nobody knows how God looks now. But they will
when we get through. If not the human race will have
been frustrated in its highest aspiration.

The history of religion is an incessant struggle be-
tween iconoplasm and iconoclasm, the alternate making
and breaking of images of God. Each may be in its
turn a step in advance. For in all forms of human

50 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

progress it is sometimes necessary to demolish the old
in order to erect the new in its place. An inferior idea
of God is often an impediment to the establishment of
a purer conception. Materialism is always an obstacle
to idealism.

The most dramatic scene in this age-long warfare of
the newer and higher ideal of divinity with the estab-
lished one was that which took place on the slopes of
Mount Sinai. After Moses had gone up into the moun-
tain in search of a new revelation of God the children
of Israel, in despair of his return, went to his brother
Aaron and asked him to make them an image of the
God who had brought them up out of the land of
Egypt. And Aaron did the best he knew to satisfy
their natural longing for an object of worship. He did
what many another religious leader has done, yes, is
doing even now; for, not having the prophetic fore-
sight, he turned to the past for his inspiration. He
melted up their golden earrings and made them a calf
after the model of Apis. Also following the religious
precedent of their times, the people worshiped by feast-
ing, drinking, and dancing naked before their idol.

In the midst of this orgy Moses appeared on the
mountain-side bearing in his arms a new manifestation
of deity, no golden bull, no image of any kind, but a
plain tablet of stone on which was inscribed a pure
ethical code, the ten commandments, the first two of
which prohibited the form of worship which was being
practiced in the valley before him.

In the first encounter, as is common in a conflict be-
tween the new and the old in religion, the old won.
The tables of stone were smashed. But, as is also usu-

THE UNBROKEN COMMANDMENTS 51

ally the case, the victory later turned toward the new.
Moses ground and burnt the molten calf and made the
children of Israel swallow it. Then he went back up
the mountain and got another copy of the ten com-
mandments inscribed upon the stone. God is very
patient. Often as we break his commandments he
writes them over again, word for word the same. How-
ever we may caricature him in our representations, he
unweariedly continues to present to us the perfect
model for our imitation.

The second edition of the ten commandments became
the accepted code of the Israelites and has descended
through them to us. The second of the command-
ments, forbidding the artists to meddle with theology,
freed the chosen people from danger of degeneration
of their ideal of deity through attempts at its materiali-
zation.

Some historians attempt to explain the comparative
purity of Semitic religions by saying that the Semites
had a natural genius for monotheism. This is nonsense.
Those Semitic peoples which did allow idols had as bad
religions as anybody. Judaism and Mohammedanism
remained pure because they kept literally the law
against images of any kind. The Jews, like everybody
else, have a natural tendency to relapse into earlier and
inferior forms of religion. Their history in the Old
Testament records a constant struggle against reversion
to idolatry, and being deprived of idolatrous objects of
worship by the law, they have regarded the book of the
law itself with a reverence sometimes approaching
adoration.

We are no longer in danger of a relapse into idola-

52 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

try of the older sort, but still the artist has to be
watched, for he has still power to pervert pure religion.
The rise of art often means the decline of devotion. It
is the sculptural and pictorial forms of art that are
most dangerous to religion because of their inveterate
tendency toward a crude anthropomorphism. The ar-
chitectural and musical forms of art are free from this
and only become injurious when they absorb and dis-
tract attention from the religion that they are designed
to serve. Excessive devotion to the art side of reli-
gion is apt to lead to luxury, exclusiveness, and sensu-
ousness. It makes religion a matter of pleasurable
emotion instead of dutiful action. It substitutes feel-
ing for doing. It exalts esthetics and subordinates
ethics.

In the early stages of religion art may be an aid, but
in later degrees of development art is apt to become
its enemy. The Greeks could not rise to the heights
of stoicism because their artists were too clever. Stat-
uary and poetry constantly recalled them to the crude
conceptions and low morality of their primitive my-
thology. Plato recognized this impediment to the higher
life of his people and so refused to admit to his ideal
Republic the works of Homer, Hesiod, and A‘schylus
because they gave false and degrading pictures of God.

Lucretius, who wrote his poem “On the Nature of
Things” to abolish belief in all gods from the mind of
mankind, begins it with a hymn to Venus. The paint-
ers of the Renaissance made their mistresses the ob-
jects of adoration to the ignorant multitude by using
them as models for their madonnas. Savonarola pro-
tested at the time against the custom of the Florentine

THE MATERIALISM OF ART 53

artists of painting pictures of the Virgin in the allur-
ing guise and well-known features of prostitutes.

The founders of religions have been men of such in-
sight that they were able to see the reality behind ap-
pearances, the eternal in the ephemeral. Their follow-
ers, lacking their vision, have endeavored to represent
the spiritual conceptions of their master through the
symbolism of metaphors and pictures. To do this they
must call to their aid the artists, who as a class are
men deficient in imagination, and who, being congeni-
tally incapable of perceiving the inner meaning of
things, have in compensation acquired dexterity in de-
picting their superficial aspects. They concern them-
selves with form and color, the accidental and temporal
appearances of objects, and disregard their permanent
principle and purpose. In fact artists of the modern
school boldly avow that their pictures have no message
or meaning whatever and are to be looked upon purely
as combinations of shades and tints on flat canvas.
They have deliberately aimed at divesting their pic-
tures of all intellectual and spiritual content, and have
been remarkaby successful in achieving their aim.

Then, too, artists are naturally materialistic and con-
servative. Matter is their medium and their appeal is
to the senses. Their ears are deaf to the music of the
spheres and they hear only air vibration of a frequency
between 16 and 40,000 per second. Music is the least
intellectual and most sensuous of the arts. It is in-
capable of conveying an idea unaided and yet is power-
ful in arousing emotion. Therefore it is capable of
carrying and enforcing the ideas imposed upon it by
words, suggestion, or association, Music is what is

54 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

called in radio the “carrier wave.” Graphic and
glyptic art is conservative because it uses the familiar
forms of the past. Painters and sculptors have their
eyes turned backwards, and it is very difficult to get
them to comprehend and present the conceptions of the
present and the ideals of the future. A false and tra-
ditional way of drawing the human figure, eyes front,
face profile, trunk front and feet side view, was main-
tained for thousands of years throughout the history
of Egyptian art. Artists drew the galloping horse in
an impossible attitude for thirty-seven centuries, from
the Mycenzan period down to thirty-five years ago,
when the motion-picture photographer set them right.’
The architects give us public buildings that fit us about
as well as the hermit crab his shell. For instance, their
idea of a bank building is a Greek temple, although
the Greeks detested banking. If an artist wants to
symbolize modern warfare he paints a sword, if he
wants to symbolize literature he paints a plume, al-
though these are not the implements now used in fight-
ing and writing, and are mostly meaningless to us.
These obvious observations should not be construed
as a condemnation of art or a criticism of artists. They
could not change their natural temperament without
ceasing to be artists. But it is necessary to see the
limitations of art to understand why it has been so
often a drag upon religion and why religious reform-
ers, such as Moses, Zoroaster, Plato, Mohammed, and
the Puritans, have viewed it with suspicion as likely to
pervert spiritual ideals in the portrayal of them.

1Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, Science from an Easy Chair, Second
Series, p. 52.

ART FOR THE UNIMAGINATIVE 55

We give different meanings to the same word accord-
ing to our temperament and disposition. Take, for in-
stance, electricity. To the scientist electricity is E=IR.
To the practical man electricity is the radio and the
dynamo. To the artist electricity is a beautiful woman
flying through the clouds with a wire in her hand. All
three conceptions are perfectly proper in their places.
No one of them tells what electricity really is, or com-
prises all it means to the modern world, but of the
three there is no doubt that either the conception of
the electrician, who regards it as a mathematical rela-
tion, or that of the practical man, who thinks only of
what it does, is more adequate than that of the artist,
and if we should allow allegorical figures to take the
place of mathematical formule in science it would fall
as low as ever religion did in its most debased period.

The desire for a pictorial representation of an ab-
stract idea or a spiritual concept is due to lack of
imagination. A person of good taste would rather have
no picture of his mother than one of these “crayon
portraits” that are thrown in when you buy the frame.
So, too, any one endowed with spiritual insight feels
a repugnance at the sight of any portrait of God, for
even one by the best of painters is rather a hindrance
than an aid to devotion.

Pictures of Jesus may give us a more realistic idea
of his life and times, and so aid us in the interpreta-
tion of his teachings. But generally the aim of the
artist is not historic accuracy but more or less symbolic
representation. Then, too, the points selected for em-
phasis are necessarily the less essential elements and
therefore tend to distract attention from the important

56 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

lessons. The larger proportion of the pictures of Jesus
present him at his birth and death, but Jesus as a babe
in arms or tortured on the cross gives us no idea of
the gospel taught by Jesus as a man.

A good example, or rather a bad one, of what the
artist does to theology when he has a free hand is one
of the most recent pictures of God in one of the finest
of our public buildings by one of the greatest of Ameri-
can painters, Sargent, in the Boston Public Library.
Here the dogma of the Trinity is represented by three
ugly men wearing a single suit of clothes. Whatever
conception we may get from the Gospels of the person-
ality of Jesus, certainly the least unlike is a Byzantine
king with a gilded plaque around his head, holding up
his fingers to symbolize a doctrine, as though he were
a deaf and dumb man. The only “proof text” I can
think of giving any ground for depicting him as a
Byzantine king is the parable of the unjust judge. If
this conveys any idea at all it is a wrong idea. The
real meaning of the second commandment is “Thou
shalt not bear false witness against thy God.”

Possibly all the pictures of God that have been made
since the world began, horrible or grotesque as some of
them seem to us, had in their prime conception some
sincere religious motive. Perhaps we might go so far
as to say that they conveyed in the language of their
time an idea of some real aspect of the manifold mani-
festations of divinity. The savage makes his mumbo-
jumbo so hideous and cruel that he is almost frightened
at it himself, still more his tribe who have not seen the
image in the making. But the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of knowledge, for out of fear grows awe, and

ANGELS AND AVIATORS +7

out of awe reverence, and out of reverence devotion.

Two things we should do in regard to all the ancient
idols, whether Baal the cannibal or Balder the beauti-
ful: we should recognize their intent and therefore ap-
preciate them; we should recognize their inadequacy
and therefore reject them. He who overthrows an idol
is more pious than he who erected it, provided he has a
better image ready to put in the emptied niche.

The first sculptor who put wings on the statue of
his god—I do not know if he were an Egyptian or a
Babylonian—meant well, and perhaps did well at the
time, though the harm he did lasts to this day. His
theology was better than his anatomy. At any rate
he was wiser than the other artists of his time who put
the head of a dog on the body of a man. He made
angels a little higher than man, and in so far he was
right. Doubtless there were some standing about to
criticize that no one would have ever seen a man fly.
To which the artist retorted, by his statue if not by
his voice: “Never mind. Men ought to be able to fly
and sometime they will.” He was right and those of
little faith were wrong. On the wings of the airplane
men have risen to the level of the ancient gods who
differed from man only in having the power of flight.
But the aviator, now we have him, does not appear to
us an angel. Sometimes indeed quite the opposite, as
when he sails over a city and rains down fire and brim-
stone on the just and unjust alike.

Probably the first airmen who dropped into an Afri-
can oasis or sailed over the Afghan mountains were
adored as divine. But why do we not hold the aviator
to be a god? Simply because our conception of deity

58 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

has risen faster than the flight of man. The abode of
the gods was once placed on Mount Olympus, which
was less than ten thousand feet high. Modern airmen
have gone up three times as far, but found heaven still
above them. The thoughts of men have widened with
the process of the sun.

The other day I stood before a modern painting of
an angel, a gorgeous creature with wings that outshone
the peacock. An eminent scientist came up and looked
at it too; finally he said: “How can we expect our
young people to come into the church when it implies
believing in such anatomical monstrosities as that!”
Here is the curious case of an unknown heathen artist
who lived some ten thousand years ago blocking the
door to a modern American church in the twentieth cen-
tury. Such a winged man is as unbiblical as it is unbio-
logical. It is a conception foreign to both Christianity
and Judaism. The angels whom Abraham and Lot en-
tertained unaware ’* certainly did not wear wings, nor
apparently did those who sat at the sepulcher of Jesus.
When the angel of the Lord—or was it the Lord him-
self?p—appeared under the oak of Ophrah and Gideon
prepared a meal for him,? when Raphael hired out to
guide Tobit to collect a debt and get a bride at Rages
in Media,* they were obviously featherless bipeds.
Angels of the sort invented by the artists of the Dark
Ages would have created as much commotion in Pales-
tine as did the one the Vicar shot down as told by
Wells in The Wonderful Visit.

2 Genesis 18 and 19.

3 Judges 6: 11-22.
#Tobit 5:5.

A ONE-INCH BOOKSHELF 59

What gives the Bible its unique value and its incom-
parable position among the sacred books of the world
is that it is not a single book but the long literature of
a race, not the work of one author like the Koran, or
the product of a particular period like the Rig Veda,
but a collection of the best thought of the most devout
of the Hebrews for some three thousand years. The
Bible is a history of that process that some call the
progressive revelation of God, and others, meaning
much the same, the evolution of religion. We could
not well spare any of its pages, even those that seem
to have no message for us, for we should miss a link
in the chain.

To those who read the Bible in its historical aspect,
and not as a unified code of doctrine, its apparent in-
consistencies cause no uneasiness. When we find that
different ages held different ideals and deduced from
them different conduct, we should endeavor to under-
stand and do justice to them all, without trying to force
a false consistency. The milestones of the highway are
of value just because they are not in the same place.
We must not misinterpret the Bible in defending it.

One of the most instructive lessons we get from the
Bible is to observe the various pictures of God as we
turn over its pages from Genesis to Revelation. Here
is one of the early pictures:

And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness,
they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath
day.

And they that found him gathering sticks brought him
unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.

60 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

And they put him in ward, because it was not declared
what should be done to him.

And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely
put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with
stones without the camp.

And all the congregation brought him without the camp,
and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the Lord com-
manded Moses.®

Contrast that with this picture of fifteen hundred
years later:

And it came to pass, that he went through the cornfields
on the sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they wert,
to pluck the ears of corn.

And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they
on the sabbath day that which is not lawful?

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man,
and not man for the sabbath:

Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.®

The priestly picture of God is very different from
that of the prophets. Four of the five books of Moses
are largely taken up with an elaborate system of injunc-
tions and taboos, of sacrifices and sabbaths, and the
most appalling penalties are threatened‘ by Jehovah
upon any who may fail to follow the law and ritual in
every detail to the end of time. Yet a few centuries
later Isaiah, speaking in the name of the same Lord,
uses very disrespectful language of these sabbaths and
sacrifices:

5 Numbers 15: 32-36.

6 Mark 2:23-24, 27-28.

7 Deuteronomy 28:15-68.

VAIN LIBATIONS 6}

“What care I for all your lavish sacrifices?”
the Eternal asks;
“T am sick of slaughtered rams,
of the fat from fatted beasts;
the blood of bullocks and of goats
is no delight to me.
Who asked that from you,
when you gather in my presence?
Crowd my courts no more,
bring offerings no more;
the smoke of sacrifice is vain,
I loathe it;
Your gatherings at the new moon and on sabbath,
I cannot abide them;
Your fasts and festivals,
my soul abhors them.
They are a weariness to me,
I am tired of them.” ®

The prophet Amos, too, reveals to us a God who cares
nothing for ritualism and much for righteousness:

“Your sacred festivals? I hate them, scorn them;
your sacrifices? I will not smell their smoke;
You offer me your gifts? I will not take them;
you offer fatted cattle? I will not look at them.
No more of your hymns for me!

I will not listen to your lutes.

No, let justice well up like fresh water,

let honesty roll in full tide.
I know your countless crimes,
your manifold misdeeds—

SIsaiah 1:11-14 (Moffatt’s version).

62 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

browbeating honest men, accepting bribes,
defrauding the poor of justice.” °

Here is a picture of God as he was known in the time
of Elisha:

And he went up from thence unto Bethel; and as. he
was going up by the way, there came forth little children
out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go
up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed
them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two
she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children
of them.?°

Compare that picture with this, some nine hundred
years later:

Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know
not what they do.**

Hear the prayer of David, “the man after God’s own
heart,’’ asking vengeance upon his enemies:

“Grant that his children be fatherless,
And that his wife be a widow,
Up and down may his children go begging,
Expelled from their desolate home.
May all that he owneth be seized by the creditor;
May strangers plunder the fruits of his toil.
May none extend to him kindness,
Or pity his fatherless children.” }*
8 Amos 5:21-24, 12 (Moffatt).
10 1T Kings 2:23-24.
11 Luke 23:34.
12 Psalm 109:9-12 (McFadyen’s trans.).

TOO MUCH OLD TESTAMENT 63
And then listen to this:

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for
them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.?®

I was talking today with a Y. M.C.A. secretary who
had served with the American army in France and I
asked: ‘What in your opinion was the real cause of
the Great War?” The answer was: “The mistake of
the early Christians of incorporating the Old Testa-
ment in the canon of Scriptures on a parity with the
New. If they had treated it as the Council of Trent
decided to treat the Apocrypha, to be read for edifica-
tion, but not for the establishment of doctrine, the
Christian Era would have been spared much bloodshed
and persecution.”

This is not so heretical a view as it may seem to
some. In The Church Militant of the diocese of Wash-
ington for May, 1925, the Rev. Clarence W. Whitworth
in planning a curriculum for church schools in the
rural districts says:

You will notice that I have left no place for the Old
Testament. This is not an accidental omission. I am
profoundly convinced that the Old Testament is the source
of most of our spiritual disasters. While it has undoubted
spiritual value for the mature mind, it is so beset with
difficulties and even absurdities that it is almost certain to
create confusion and doubt. If it is handled at all, it must
be handled honestly and fully with all the assured results
of criticism and scientific research frankly dealt with. All

13 Matthew 5: 44.

64 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

this can be done only with a mature mind. As for using
the “hero stories” of the Old Testament as a child’s intro-
duction to religion, I can imagine nothing more calculated
to make heathen out of children, and their general use is
doubtless why most of our children are heathen.

A little girl, reading her way for the first time
through the Old Testament, was much shocked at strik-
ing some such passages as I have quoted. She took her
perplexities to her father, a clergyman, who, without
endeavoring to explain them away, turned her atten-
tion to passages of a different tenor in the New Testa-
ment. After reading these she came to her father much
relieved in mind, and, climbing up into his lap, ob-
served: “Papa, God grew better as he got older, didn’t
he?”

That is one way of looking at it, certainly. Another
is that men got a clearer vision of Him in the course of
time. The imperfections we discern in the Deity are
due to defects in our own eyesight.

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they."*

No one need have his faith shaken by the fact that
there are so many and so different pictures of God.
None of them can be complete and correct. None of
them is perhaps altogether false. Their diversity is not
only evidence of the sincerity of the artists but also a
proof of the reality of the object they depict.

14 “Tn Memoriam.”

MANY PICTURES, ONE GOD 65

The teacher of a drawing class will arrange his stu-
dents in a ring and set a chair in the middle for them
to sketch. Every picture is different, if it be true. The
legs are of different length, the rungs have different
angles, the seat has a different shape. If the teacher
finds any two drawings just alike he knows that one of
the students is a cheat or a liar. He either has copied
from his neighbor or has drawn the chair from his
imagination. He has not depicted truthfully what he
actually saw but what he thinks he might have seen if
he had sat somewhere else. No picture of the chair in
all its aspects has ever been drawn or ever can be, for
no man has ever so seen it or can see it. The real
chair as a whole is invisible to mortal eyes, like all real
things. Mortal eyes can see only the surface and only
one side of that at a time.

So it is in theology. If all the pictures of God in the
world were alike, we should have good ground for
doubting the existence of God, for we should know that
all the pictures were blind copies of one, and the man
who made that one might have invented a fictitious be-
ing. But since men of the most diverse minds in all
ages and in every land have professed to have had some
sort of vision of God, and have tried in their various
ways by pen or pencil to depict what they saw, we must
believe that there is a reality behind all these repre-
sentations. More than that, we can get quite a clear
conception of that unknown God whom all men ig-
norantly worship if we diligently study the multiform
pictures of him that have been drawn by the priests
and prophets, saints and sages, mystics and philos-
ophers, poets and artists, of the last six thousand years,

66 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

And, chiefly, its divinest trace,
In Him of Nazareth’s holy face.

We can discern in them certain common traits by
critically comparing and contrasting them, rejecting
some as worthless or imitative, accepting others at full
face value so far as they go. For we find that God
cannot be completely portrayed in any canvas, any
block of marble, any book. After all our labor we
come to the conclusion that God is essentially ineffable
and invisible and above all human comprehension. Can
man by searching find out God? Yet the search is not
in vain.

“No man hath seen God at any time.”’** Yet we
are told in the same volume*® that Moses, Aaron,
Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel
saw him at Horeb. Jacob named the place of his
wrestling Peniel because, as he said, “I have seen God
face to face, and yet I am alive!”**’ But when God
spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai he said: ** “Thou canst
not see my face: for there shall no man see my face
and live.” So Moses was put in a cleft of the rock and
covered with the hand of God till he had passed by.
“‘And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see
my back parts; but my face shall not be seen.” Yet
it was because Moses did not know how God looked
that he was warned against iconographic representa
tions:

15] John 4:12.

16 Exodus 24: 9-11.

17 Genesis 32:30 (Moffatt’s version).
18 Exodus 33:20, 23.

UNCONSTRUCTIVE CRITICS 67

You saw no shape on the day when the Eternal spoke to
you out of the flames at Horeb; beware, then, of depraving
yourselves by carving an idol in the shape of any statue,
either male or female, or like any beast on earth, any bird
that flies, any insect crawling on the ground, or any fish
in the sea; beware of looking up to the sky and then, as
you see the whole host of heaven, the sun and moon and
stars, letting yourselves be allured to bend in worship of
them. The Eternal your God has allotted them for wor-
ship to all nations under the broad sky, but the Eternal
took you and lifted you from the iron furnace of Egypt,
to be a people of his own, as it is today.}®

Some say that the higher critics have gone too far.
It seems to me that they have not gone far enough.
We chemists regard analysis as merely the first step
toward synthesis. We take compounds apart, not from
idle curiosity to see what they are made of, but in
order that we may put the parts together again in some
new and better way. Children tear up books for the
fun of it and leave the floor all littered with scraps of
paper for somebody else to pick up. I don’t begrudge
the biblical critics their fun, but I do wish that some-
body would pick up their tatters and put them to-
gether and make something out of them. Perhaps that
is not their duty but the job of the theologian. But we
seem to be short of theologians nowadays, although
they were never more needed.

It is very ungrateful to find fault with the scholars
who have devoted their lives to the elucidation of the
Bible, toiling in the trenches under a tropical sun or
moiling over manuscripts in a museum. We must ad-

19 Deut. 4: 15-20 (Moffatt’s version).

68 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

mire the ingenuity with which they run down every lit-
tle clew afforded by the forms of words or the style of
writing. It is to their labors that we laymen owe the
opportunity, that no previous generation ever enjoyed,
of getting close to the meaning of the text through
translations and of understanding its historic setting.
But it does seem to me that by long concentration of
their gaze upon the page they sometimes become a bit
nearsighted. They are too modest in thir aims, too
low in their ambitions. There is something higher
than higher criticism.

To be specific in my criticism of the critics, they are
too much absorbed in questions of authorship. From
a scientific point of view this seems absurd because it
makes no difference who wrote a thing if it is true,
and if it is not true it matters still less.?° If some censor
should go through a chemical library and blot out the
name of every chemist in every book, it would not make
any material difference in the value of the volumes.
It would merely bother us in looking up references.
No chemical fact would be lost.

Religion is real, whoever wrote about it. The Chris-
tian experience is verifiable by any one who cares to
try it. What we have learned about the ways of God,
whether we have got it from inspiration or from inves-
tigation, whether we have obtained it secondhand from
books written by fallible men or have derived it directly
from God’s own book of Nature, has become our per-

20 The proof-reader queries this, but on reflection I will leave
it as I wrote it. I mean that if what you are working on turns out
to be wrong you not only get nothing but are out your labor; so its
value is a minus quantity.

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD OF JESUS 69

manent possession and may be substantiated at any
time.

If a student browsing about the chemical library
comes across something that he does not believe and
takes it to the teacher, the teacher does not say, “Look
at the name of the author and doubt it if you dare.”
No, he says, ‘Go into the laboratory and try it for
yourself.”

That is the scientific method, and that is the method

of Jesus. “If any man will do his will, he shall know
of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak
of myself.” John sent two of his disciples to Jesus to ask
if he were the Christ: “Then Jesus answering said unto
them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have
seen and heard.” ** It was the pragmatic test to which
he appealed, how his religion worked, the severest and
the certainest test in the world. Christianity, in so far
as it is truly Christian, rests upon the same solid foun-
dation as chemistry.
_ Fortunately most of the books of the Bible are
anonymous, and I am glad to see that the labors of the
critics have made even more of them anonymous by
casting doubt upon their putative authorship. That
gives the books a chance to be considered upon their
merits without prejudice for or against by reason of
the name traditionally attached to them, and it leaves
us free to devote our time to the more important ques-
tion of what they mean to us and how we can apply
them.

If I am shown the veritable desk on which Jefferson
wrote the Declaration of Independence I look at it with

21 Luke 7:22.

70 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

curiosity and even experience a momentary thrill. But
I do not linger over it longer than sixty seconds, be-
cause the question I am interested in is not whether
this is the actual desk or a forgery, but whether the
Declaration is true or not. I do not mean whether the
charges against King George are exaggerated or exact,
for that is a purely historical question of no practical
importance today; but when Jefferson wrote, “All men
are created equal,” did he state a fact, and, if so, how
can we secure the “‘inalienable rights” to which we are
all entitled? Iam quite sure that Jefferson would like
to have us look at it in this way.

This is what I mean when I say that the biblical
critics do not go far enough to suit me. For instance,
I have just quoted Genesis 32: 30 on Jacob’s wrestle at
Peniel or Penuel. I look it up in Bacon’s Genesis of
Genesis and I find that he says that the passage is in-
terpolated by “EE, an Ephraimite prophetic writer, circ.
750 B.C.” in a document mainly by “J, a Judean
prophetic writer, circ. 800 B.c.”’ All right, Dr. Bacon,
I take your word for it, not being able to read the
original and not having any other higher critic at
hand. But if E took the trouble to interpolate this
passage he must have thought it important, and maybe
it is. He doubtless believed it, and I had just as soon
trust E as J, not knowing either of them and both hav-
ing lived a thousand years after the events they nar-
rate. Some critics say that the wrestling with the
angel was an allegory and that Jacob himself was a
mythic eponym. But that does not settle the question
even if I accept that view. The writer of that pas-
sage, whether he was E or J or X or Y, was real, even if

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD 71

Jacob was an eponym, for the passage exists. What I
want to know is what it means when it says that Jacob
saw God face to face. Is that to be taken literally?
If Jacob could, why can’t I? How did the writer
reconcile this passage with those saying that no man
could see God and live? If he did not believe the op- —
posing passages, why did not he or some subsequent
redactor scratch them out when the manuscript passed
through his hands?

Each age paints its own picture of God. The deities
of one epoch become the demons of the next. The
devas were later called devils. The great god Pan of
the Romans becomes the Satan of the Christians.

But God hath not left himself without a witness even
among the Gentiles. The picture of Zeus in Cleanthes’
hymn which Paul quotes with approval ”’ was a higher
ideal than Jephthah’s conception of Jehovah.** But
few of the Greeks rose to the heights of Cleanthes and
Zeus could not on the whole compare with Jehovah, as
depicted by their respective devotees. Jehovah ap-
pears from the first as a decent God, although a bloody
one, while Zeus had a past that he could never live
down.

To ascribe wings to God was a primitive inspiration.
To ascribe. morals to God was not thought of for a
thousand years after.

But in recognizing the superiority of the ideal of
divinity revealed in the New Testament over that re-
vealed in the Old, we must not ignore the truth that
resides in the latter. We must not forget Jehovah in

22 Acts 17:28.
23 Judges 11.

72 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

our adoration of Christ. We must not let our love of
mercy obliterate our sense of justice. This needs some
emphasis now because there is a tendency to blot out
the severer aspects of the moral law with a smear of
sentimentality. In law the governor’s pardon follows
after the judge’s sentence. But we are in such haste
to assure the sinner of forgiveness that we do not wait
till he has been convicted of sin.

Why attempt to make any picture of God if we
know that the best picture must be to some degree in-
adequate and hence misleading? Because we must.
We can convey ideas only by symbols of some sort,
first pictures, later words; and the more abstract the
ideas the more essential, although the more inadequate,
is the use of symbols.

Xenophanes said that if cattle could paint pictures
of their gods they would be cattle gods. Very likely,
and very sensible of them, too. Much better than if
the cattle worshiped worms. But when man makes
gods of cattle as he did in Egypt, Assyria, and India,
he is demeaning himself, rejecting his birthright, re-
pudiating his race. The worship of the golden calf at
Horeb was worse than ordinary idolatry; it was also
backsliding.

Since man knows no higher creature than himself
upon the earth he can do no better than to use human
attributes in describing any higher being. This is what
the theologians call “‘anthropomorphism,” and the ques-
tion of the degree of anthropomorphism allowable has
been the chief point of dispute in religious controversy
to this day. The tendency is ridiculed by such paro-

ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN SCIENCE 73

dies as: “An honest God is the noblest work of man.”
‘(Man created gods in his own image, in the image of
man created he them, male and female created he
them.”

But so long as man remains manlike his ideas will
necessarily remain manlike. However he may receive
his vision of divinity, he must put it into words or pic-
tures or acts before it can be conveyed to others. The
spiritual ideal must be incarnated in a material form.
The unknown must be described in terms of the known,
the abstract in the concrete.

The same is true also in science. It shows itself in
biology, physics, chemistry, even mathematics and
metaphysics. Scientists are by no means so free from
anthropomorphism as they think they are. I remem-
ber my teacher in chemistry, Professor Nef of the Uni-
versity of Chicago, a scientist of the strictest sect,
would say in describing the transformation of a mole-
cule that he had drawn on the board: “The atoms are
uncomfortable when they are in this position. They do
not feel happy till they have rearranged themselves
so.” ** Goethe says truly:

“All natural philosophy is in the last resort only anthro-
pomorphism. We can at will observe nature, measure, cal-
culate and ponder it, but it always remains our impression,
our world. Man always remains the measure of all things.”

24 As I am preparing this for the press I happen upon another
example of unconscious anthropomorphism. E. J. Brockman in a
paper before the Baltimore meeting of the American Chemical
Society, 1925, says: “It is suggested that the formation of com-
plex compounds be due to an inherent desire on the part of the
atom of certain elements to complete its outer shell of electrons.”

74 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

But as man in the course of ages becomes more ac-
curate in delineating the attributes of Deity he drops
his crude conception of God as merely a magnified
man. When this faulty picture of God has been super-
seded man loses with it certain of his sins. For in-
stance, blasphemy arises from an incorrect conception
of God, from crude anthropomorphism. A man may
shake his puny fist in the face of Omnipotence—if Om-
nipotence appears as a man like himself in every re-
spect except size. But if Omnipotence is conceived as
natural law, as an inexorable and impersonal force,
then there remains to man no course but humble sub-
missiveness and teachableness. A man may go up
boldly against an army of other men but he will not
beat his head against a stone wall unless he is insane.
Ajax defying the lightning is an heroic figure because
he conceived of lightning as jagged arrows in the hand
of Jove. But when Ajax comes to conceive of lightning
as a high potential difference in electromotive force be-
tween the clouds and the earth he no longer shakes his
fist at it. He puts up a lightning rod. A man may
curse God if he regards him as a tyrant, but it is im-
possible to curse the law of gravitation. If God is “the
invisible King’’ and physical laws merely his fiats, then
we are tempted to try to disobey them. But if physical
laws are merely the concise expression of the invariable
sequence of events there is no fun in defying them.
As man gets a clearer conception of the character of
the supreme Being blasphemy becomes not so much
wicked as simply absurd.

Law conceived as a command may arouse resentment
and rebellion. But one cannot get angry at an alge-

EXPERIMENTAL CHRISTIANITY ay

braic formula. To the modern mind a natural law is
not a command, but a key; not a prohibition against
meddling with the secrets of nature, but a means of un-
locking them. The marvels of applied science which
make up our modern life show how much truer is our
idea of God in this respect than that of the ancients.
Kepler, when he discovered the law of planetary mo-
tion, cried: “I think thy thoughts after thee, O God.”
That we are at last in certain fields and to some degree
following the line of thought of the creative intellect is
proved by the experimental verification of our hy-
potheses. A child solving his problems in arithmetic
knows when he gets the right answer by finding that
it works backwards. In the same way we know when
we have got the right answer to any of the problems of
nature, for then the rule will work, and work both
ways, from theory to concrete application and back
again.

I hope you will not think I have talked too long and
tediously on this subject of symbolism. There is no
question more important to understand, since it is the
key to the history of religion and the key to other his-
tories as well. The religious wars—No, there are none
such; I should say, the wars about religions, have been
mostly quarrels over symbols; sometimes, sad to say,
over symbols which had lost their meaning to most of
the contestants. Symbolism of some sort we cannot
escape. We can only exchange one symbol for an-
other, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the
worse. An explanation is at bottom merely an ex-
change of symbols.

It will help to keep us tolerant if we bear in mind

76 PAINTING THE PICTURE OF GOD

the possibility of two or more different but equally good
symbols for the same object, like two words for the
same idea, or two theories for the same phenomenon.

A symbol is like a pane of glass, something to be
seen through, not to be looked at. When it gets old,
dusty, and opaque, then it becomes the object instead
of the medium. Successive generations come to the
window through which their ancestors, or perhaps only
a single keen-sighted mystic, formerly saw the light of
heaven. But in the course of centuries the glass has
darkened, and become obscured by neglect to keep it
clean, or encrusted with the gold and gems with which
the pious devotees have adorned it. Still many come
and kneel before the window and go away pretending
that they too have seen the heavenly vision; and some
go away Sneering and, because they see nothing through
the glass now, they say that nobody ever did, that the
first man was a liar and all the rest were hypocrites.

Since symbols quarrel so, and material representa-
tions misrepresent materially, and idols are hard to
overthrow when once they get implanted, the safest
way is that prescribed by the second commandment, to
make worship aniconic. There are other and better
means of portraying God than by paint or chisel.

All truth, wherever gained, adds to our knowledge of
God. Every tiny gem of hard fact that science dis-
covers may add to the mosaic picture of God, though,
since the scientist rarely puts it in place himself, and
the theologian is apt to ignore it, such tessere mostly
lie about unused.

The institutions of society, the church, the home, the
nation, may be modeled after the divine ideal and may

GOD MANIFEST IN MAN 77

be filled with the divine spirit and may be carrying out
the divine will—or they may be quite the opposite.
Woe unto us if our government or our business follows
a false god, if it depicts Moloch instead of God the
Father.

But it is not in nature and not in art that we can
find the best images of God. It is in man himself. As
we have seen, our idea of God must necessarily be an-
thropomorphic. Let us then accept this limitation and
take advantage of it to make humanity theomorphic.
It may seem absurd that a finite being should aim to
imitate infinitude. But a tiny pool may reflect the
whole of heaven, if it keep itself calm and clear and
peaceful, if it does not allow its own ripples to distort
the image so cast upon it from above.

Would you see God? Then ponder the saying of
Jesus quoted by Clement of Alexandria: “If thou hast
seen thy brother thou hast seen God.”

““As many as received him to them he gave power to
become the sons of God.” Children take after their
father. Heredity is the only authentic proof of pa-
ternity. We are asked to make ourselves over in the
likeness of God. “Glorify God in your body and in
your spirit.”

If the Christian be not Christlike he has no right to
the name. He isa standing repudiation of the father-
hood of God.

What kind of picture of God are you displaying to
the world?

BLACK AND WHITE

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness,
hath shined in our hearts—II Corinthians 4: 6.

To hear colors and to see sounds is an experience not
vouchsafed to most of us. Yet we all do something of
the same kind that is quite as remarkable, we ascribe
colors to the ethical qualities. Universally do men call
goodness white and wickedness black. Angels and
devils, wherever they appear upon the surface of the
earth, are clothed in these colors with an appropriate-
ness that seems to be instinctive and inevitable. White
may be the color of mourning as it is in China. Black
may be the garb of respectability as it often is with us.
These are matters of custom. But when it comes to
ethics all men see alike and never confuse black and
white. To turn from the power of Satan unto God is
to turn from darkness unto light.

Wherefore this certainty about what no man can
prover Who has seen goodness that he can tell us
whether it be black or white? If we are endowed with
an ethical sense, which some dispute, the eyeball is at
any rate not the organ of it. What reason is there for
ascribing whiteness to goodness? None whatever.
But when we reverse the question, and ask is there any
reason for ascribing goodness to whiteness, we see at
once that there is.

For black is the most selfish of Poors and white the

most unselfish. They correspond then exactly with our
78

POLYCHROMATIC ETHICS 79

conceptions of vice and virtue and the association of
ideas is inevitable, since our highest ideal of goodness
is perfect unselfishness, absolute altruism. “Freely ye
have received, freely give” is the injunction of the
Master. The white object obeys it literally. All the
light rays it receives, whatever their kind, whatever
their source, these it returns in full measure, undimin-
ished, unimpaired, equally, and in all directions. But
the black object does just the opposite. What comes to
it, it keeps. Blue rays, red rays, or any rays between,
all the colors of the rainbow, all that give beauty to
the world, when they come to a black surface are ab-
sorbed and are seen no more. Never again will they
flash about to gladden the sight and enlighten the mind.
Their doom is forever sealed. For over the black por-
tal is written, ‘“Ye who enter here leave hope behind.”
Black is the Mephistophelean color. It is the Spirit
That Denies. It is that which retains, destroys, anni-
hilates.

Our common parlance is wrong from the point of
view of the physicist. For black is to him not a color,
but the absence of all color, while white is a color, the
color, for it is all colors. A similar mistake was made
when the electricities were named by Franklin. It now
seems likely to turn out that “negative” electricity is
the only electricity there is, and “positive” electricity
is merely the absence of it. So light is the real thing;
pure disembodied energy, ever in motion, swifter than
aught else can be, flying through empty space without
retardation or deviations. But black is nothing but the
place where light has been stopped and killed; every
black object is its funeral pile.

80 BLACK AND WHITE

“How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world,”

mused sentimental Portia, having doffed her lawyer’s
robe. A trite thought, because a true one, that virtue
is always to be distinguished by its activity in radia-
tion, by the brightness and penetration of its beams,
by its effects upon its environment. It is, at any rate,
the best text we have of goodness. The particular vir-
tue Portia had in mind—was it Antonio’s generosity to
Bassanio or her own skill in foiling Shylock?—gave
forth its full one candle-power of light. But many a
16 c.p. incandescent or 1,000 c.p. arc fails to live up
to its rating when measured by this ethical photometry.

A bad deed cannot radiate. At most it is a stain, a
blot, which only becomes visible by contrast, which
must depend upon its eternal antagonist to give it
existence. Its influence is local, for the reason that it
is essentially ungenerous. Its blackness is confined to
itself. It has no power given it to shed darkness upon
surrounding objects, as everything white or colored has
of making all things about it more like itself.

There is a proverb much heard nowadays that I
never could see the sense of: ““The pot can’t call the
kettle black.” Why not, I should like to know? The
kettle 7s black. It ought to be called black. Who has
a better right to speak with confidence about the faults
of the kettle than the pot, which has for years hung on
the same crane and inhaled the same smoke? Truthful-
ness is a virtue if smuttiness is a vice. If there is any-
thing that would make the pot seem less sooty in our
eyes it is giving us a clear reflection of the image of the

THE POT AND THE KETTLE 81

kettle. Shall no one point out blackness anywhere un-
less he knows himself to be speckless? Would the pot
rise in our estimation if it followed the custom of its
critics and said, ‘““The kettle is white, as white as Iam?”
There is, strictly speaking, neither black nor white in
this world of ours. There are merely things darker and
lighter and variously colored. We all specialize in the
virtues, devoting our attention to such as suit our pur-
poses. Some of us favor the lower end of the moral
spectrum and display the red badge of courage. Oth-
ers cultivate the more delicate vibrations of the blue
end, purity, constancy, and truth. Most of us are
prismatic and changeable, flashing forth sometimes one
color and sometimes another; perhaps in the course of
a lifetime displaying them all, but never all at once and
equally in all directions. For the best of us reflect
brokenly and partially what comes to us from the
source of all goodness, the Sun of Righteousness.

FAITH

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen——Hebrews 11:1.

EacH profession or school of thought has its own lan-
guage, its technical terms, its special phrases, that are
used with facility and understanding by the members
of that profession but which are not comprehended by
other people. And whatever is not understood is an-
noyingly offensive. “Shop talk” is always obnoxious
to all except the shopmen. We only partially under-
stand a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer when he is
talking on technical subjects. Science is a bore to most
people, largely because they don’t understand the lan-
guage.

Now, of all the sciences, theology has suffered most
from this lack of popular understanding of the techni-
cal terms because it is more important that everybody
should be able to understand a minister than that he
should understand a botanist or a physicist. I think
the repellent aspect of theological language has had a
great deal to do with keeping people out of the church.
Many a man has fought all his life against a creed
which he would accept at once if it were translated into
his own language.

I propose to give here a non-theological discussion
of a theological term, the word “faith.” The word is
largely a theological one but the thing itself is not

82

THE FAITH OF A CHEMIST 83

merely theological. In fact the reason why I feel less
incompetent to discuss this subject than most others in
theology is that in my daily work I walk by faith and
not by sight. My tools and materials are atoms and
molecules, things no one has ever seen, and no one ever
can see. Every act is carried on in obedience to natu-
ral laws for which I know no reason; but if I should
lose faith in them it would be at the risk of my life. In
this, however, I am doing no more and no less than
every one else. Every one who lives must put constant
faith in the laws of nature. Unwavering, unquestion-
ing faith, blind faith, for nobody knows much about the
natural forces which he is nevertheless compelled to put
faith in.

The law of gravitation was discovered by Newton—
that is, our knowledge of it began with him; but men
knew it before by faith just as indeed they know it now.
A man puts faith in the laws of gravitation long before
he studies physics. You know that walking is simply
continual falling. You stand on one foot and throw
yourself forward, relying on the force of gravitation to
bring your body into position to be caught by your
other foot. Now if the force of gravitation should
change, becoming less or greater or reversed in direc-
tion, the result would be disastrous. So it is literally
true that we walk by faith and not by sight.

Every breath we draw, every mouthful we eat, is
taken with perfect confidence in the chemical laws that
govern the composition and reactions of air and food.
The farmer who plants his seed puts faith in more laws
of meteorology than the science of meteorology knows.
He puts faith in the botanical law announced at the

84 FAITH

foundation of the world that every seed shall bring
forth of its kind. He is sure if he plants alfalfa it will
not come up turnips—but he does not know why.
Neither does anybody else.

There is a popular impression that scientific men do
not need to use faith because they understand the rea-
son for things. That is a great mistake. Nobody
really “understands” anything. We know the “how” of
a few things, the “why” of nothing. The law of gravi-
tation is simply the statement of a fact; it is not an
explanation. There is no theory of gravitation. The
only reason that I or anybody can give why a book
should not go up instead of down when J let go of it, is
that it always has gone that way.

A dog seeing the book go up and not down might
be so surprised that he would run and hide; an ignorant
man incurious in nature’s ways might wonder and talk
about it for a week; a scholar might spend a lifetime if
necessary in finding out more about it. The man who
has studied science does not know so very much more
than the man who has not, but he has a great deal more
faith. The unscientific man is credulous because of
lack of faith. He will invest money in a perpetual mo-
tion machine, he will employ a rainmaker to send a lit-
tle smoke up into the air, he will regulate his business
by a horoscope, he will buy a bottle of red liquid to
enable him to burn water in his motor or ashes in his
furnace, he will take a drug that is guaranteed to cure
all diseases, he does not question the possibility of get-
ting something out of nothing.

The scientist does not believe these things, but he
cannot tell why they may not be. He simply has

THE DYNAMICS OF FAITH 85

greater faith in the constancy of natural law of which
these would be contradictions.

Are not the ways of God past finding out? UIlti-
mately, yes, but still we can find out a great deal about
them. A chemical library gives a good deal of informa-
tion as to how God handles atoms and molecules; a
biological library, about how he constructs animals; a
historical library, about what he is doing with men. By
studying the past we can see what God has been doing
and by faith in his constancy of purpose we may antici-
pate what he is going to do. We may to some extent
interpret God’s purposes. This is of the greatest im-
portance, for it is right here that our part comes in.
When we find out what God wishes done, then we can
only show our faith in him by doing it. That is what
religion is, carrying out God’s purposes. That is what
we are here for, just as it is what the sun, moon, and
stars are here for.

As Blake puts it,

If the Sun and Moon should doubt
They’d immediately go out.

To know God and to do his will—that is the whole
duty of man. And the word “faith” covers. both, for
faith without works is dead—that is, there isn’t any
such thing as faith without works because we show our
faith by our works.

You must distinguish between faith and belief. A
great deal of trouble has come from confusing the two.
Faith involves action, it is a part of life, belief is a
purely intellectual process of much less importance. It

86 FAITH

is not even necessary that they coincide. In science we
put faith in many things that we don’t believe. We
don’t believe that two parallel lines meet, we don’t be-
lieve that a circle is made of a lot of straight lines, we
don’t believe in the square root of minus one, we don’t
believe that space is curved, we don’t believe that the
ether is harder than steel and softer than air. But we
have implicit faith in all these because by using them
we are able to carry out our calculations to correct
conclusions. It is only by the use of incredible assump-
tions like these that the paths of the planets can be
calculated, or dynamos built, or the strength of bridges
determined.

The scientist must act as if certain assumptions are
true though often he can see no reason for them and
sometimes indeed they seem unreasonable.

One of the reasons why science is regarded by some
people as a rival and enemy of religion is that they
are misled by the idea that teachers of science spend
their time trying to persuade their pupils to believe
some thing or other. They do not realize that the
question of credence rarely arises in scientific affairs.
I taught chemistry for eighteen years, but it never oc-
curred to me to ask one of my students if he thought
the atomic theory was true. I should as soon have
asked him if the atomic theory was blue. I did not
care whether he believed the atomic theory or not.
That made no difference to me or to my students. All
I tried to do was to teach them to use the atomic
theory and to realize that if they did not they might
get blown up.

Faith is the stimulus and guide to action. That is

EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN 87

why faith and works are so closely, if not inseparably,
connected. A mere intellectual belief may not have
any influence on conduct. “The devils also believe,
and tremble.” Trembling is not a form of action, al-
though many folks seem to think so.

The chemist believes that Faraday discovered ben-
zene a hundred years ago. Doubtless that is true, but
it does not matter much if the belief is false. We have
benzene now, whoever discovered it. But suppose the
chemist conceives the idea that he can make a new
compound out of benzene by treating it with an un-
tried chemical. He can hardly be said to believe in
this nonexistent compound; at least he has no right to
till the experiment is tried. He may frankly admit, if
you ask him, that the chances are ninety-nine to one
against his notion being true. It is merely an hypothe-
sis, an unproved proposition, an unsupported assertion,
an act of faith, which may or may not have the backing
of reason.’ In fact it may be contrary to the textbooks,
and so incongruous with the laws of nature, as held by
his colleagues and himself, that he is ashamed to men-
tion it to them. But he has faith enough in it to go
into the laboratory and try it, perhaps to work on it
for years. And his faith may be justified by its fruits.
He may make the new compound and it may trans-
form the world. That is the way science makes prog-
ress, or one of the ways. Man throws his mind for-
ward into the darkness, as a sailor his anchor; it

1 Even Bacon, the apostle of rational and orderly research, ad-
vises trying crazy and absurd experiments. See page 28 of my
Chats on Science, also the chapter on “How Scientific Inspiration
Comes,” which shows some curious analogies between scientific and

religious experience.

88 | FAITH

catches onto something unknown and then he pulls
himself up to it by the rope of reason.

But some one may object that I have not said any-
thing about faith in God. It is true that I have not
mentioned faith in God, but that is what I have been
talking about all the time. If faith in the laws of the
material world and the laws, less known but no less real,
that govern the actions of human beings is not faith in
God, then I don’t know what it is. For the natural
laws that we are so proud of and which some men wor-
ship, are after all creatures of our own imaginations,
more or less crude representations of what we see and
hear. Our textbooks are but foggy photographs of
the acts of God, taken by the pinhole camera of the
mind of man.

The belief that God wound up the world in the be-
ginning and set it running and that it has been running
by itself ever since, except for a little regulating now
and then, is rank materialism. We believe in God the
Sustainer as well as God the Creator. We believe in a
God of the present—not merely a God who did some-
thing once but a God who does everything now. For we
can get no further back in our explanation of why the
book falls down than the simple fact that God put the
book and the earth together. That is the ultimate end
of all our knowledge, the goal to which all roads lead.
We can study how he puts them together, measure the
force and the speed, but why we shall never know. So
it is true that every one has faith in God to some extent
though he may not know it any more than he knows
that he walks by faith in gravitation; but there are de-
grees of faith. Some trust God a little, some more,

FAITH IN THE MARKET-PLACE 89

none altogether. The Christian trusts God a little more
than others because he knows more about him. Faith
comes from acquaintance, from communion.

The definition of faith given by St. Thomas Aquinas,
greatest of medieval theologians, is a good one: “Faith
is the courage of the spirit which projects itself for-
ward, sure of finding the truth.” That is, faith is fu-
turistic and activistic. ‘This distinguishes faith from
belief, which concerns past events and is passive.

Our social life too involves constant faith. We some-
times hear a man say he has lost all faith in everybody,
but if you watch him you will see that his acts belie
his words. It is impossible to live among men without
faith in them just as it is impossible to breathe without
faith in the air. Such a man when he meets a stranger
does not turn round to see if he is going to stab him in
the back. Time was when men did do that, but no
one has so little faith now. Modern commerce is the
most remarkable example of the growth of faith with
civilization. It is only a few centuries since the Flor-
entine merchants conceived the idea of exchanging
promises instead of cash; now that is the way most of
the business is done. The greater the transaction the
less likely that there will be any hard money used. In-
deed, so rapidly does our faith increase that it is quite
within the bounds of possibility that in time no money
of intrinsic value, no gold or silver, will be actually ex-
changed in ordinary transactions. A bank is a temple
of faith.

I have heard men tell of bribery and corruption in
politics and end by saying that they had lost all faith
in the government, but I never dared to risk offering

90 FAITH

them a greenback or a government bond to see if they
were really in earnest. Any one who puts a stamp on
a letter and drops it in the box puts faith in the govern-
ment. So too we may think and talk evil of our neigh-
bors, but we entrust them every day with our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor. Civilization is simply
an education in faith. War and anarchy are alike due
to faithlessness.

Read the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, in which Paul
gives examples of what faith has done for the advance-
ment of his own race:

Through faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God, so that things that are seen
were not made of things which do appear... .

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a
place which he should after receive for an inheritance,
obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. .. .

By faith Moses ... forsook Egypt, not fearing the
wrath of the king; for he endured, as seeing him who is
invisible. ...

By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry
land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned.

By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were
compassed about seven days. ...

And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me
to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of
Jephthe; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets:

Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteous-
ness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,

Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the
sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant
in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.

THE EPISTLE TO THE AMERICANS 91

Our own history is as full of the marvelous achieve-
ments of men of faith as was that of the ancient He-
brews, and we should see it as clearly if only our his-
torians were as good as theirs. Let me continue the
list, not in parody, but in the same spirit as Paul.

By faith Columbus set out in an open boat to go
around the unknown world.

By faith the Pilgrim fathers left their homes and
landed on the stern and rock-bound coast of New Eng-
land. They sought liberty to worship God and became
our spiritual forefathers.

By faith Washington took up arms against an em-
pire whose morning drum-beats encircled the world.

By faith Jefferson bought the land wherein millions
now live, although people laughed at him for acquiring
useless and inaccessible territory.

By faith our fathers crossed the prairies as of old
their fathers crossed the sea, to make the West as the
East, the homestead of the free.

By faith a band of American missionaries went to
the cannibal islands and gave us Hawaii.

And what shall I say of those who by faith removed
mountains and bridged rivers; who brought waters to
a thirsty land and made the desert rejoice and blossom
as the rose; who gave sight to the blind, cleansed the
lepers, and caused the lame to walk; of those who went
over the sea to share the peril of oppressed peoples,
who suffered torment and death from fire and smoke;
those who took food to the starving in strange lands;
and those who went down into the sea in ships and up
into the air like eagles?

History is full of miracles wrought by faith; mira-

92 | FAITH

cles of invention by men who had faith in the God of
nature, miracles of war by men who had faith in the
Lord of Hosts, miracles of philanthropy by men who
had faith in the All Merciful, miracles of reform by
men who had faith in the God of righteousness.

What is there that cannot be accomplished by faith?
The Bible says nothing. If any man does not believe
it, let him set the limits. Does he know how bad the dis-
ease that faith cannot cure, does he know how corrupt
the nation that faith will not regenerate, does he know
how wicked the heart is that faith cannot redeem? The
statements made in the Bible are very sweeping. “If
ye shall ask anything in my name I will do it.”

Now at first sight this puts the government of the
universe in the hands of every individual, of fallible
men with passions and prejudices, of men of different
opinions whose prayers would be contradictory. But if
we examine the words “in my name” we shall see it
means more than the formal words “‘for Christ’s sake”
with which we end our prayers. It means that the pe-
tition is made by a follower of Christ, by one who is
striving to bring his own will in harmony with the will
of God. The petitioner believes that his request is one
which would receive the indorsement of Christ, and if
it would not, he would be the first to wish it void. When
a man has faith to say that, his prayers will be an-
swered. He shares in the omnipotence of God. God
reigns and those who are with God are always on the
winning side in the struggle of this life. “All things
work together for good to them that love God.”

To have a strong and well-founded faith in God we
must know him. We must study his self-revelation in

ON THE LORD’S SIDE 93

nature, in history and best of all in the Bible, and when
we have found out a little of his purposes, then we are
to make our purposes the same, for it is in vain that a
man fights against God. It is only the man who is on
the Lord’s side that succeeds in anything. It is only of
him who has faith that it may be said, ‘“‘Whatsoever he
doeth shall prosper.” Faith is harmony with God,
working with him, thinking with him, feeling with him.

THE INTERNAL CONFLICT

I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present
with me.—Romans 7:14-25; 8:1-14.

THE older we grow, the more complex does life ap-
pear to us. When we are young the problems of life
seem quite simple. We have few, but very definite,
opinions; we attack our work with singleness of pur-
pose. We make up our minds quickly because we
haven’t much of any minds to make up. To any ques-
tion there are but two sides, the right side and the
wrong side, as easily distinguished as black from white.
We are therefore intolerant.

As we grow older, we find that all questions are really
polygons, with many sides, and it is often hard to dis-
tinguish the right one among them. We find that many
sincere attempts to reform the world have only resulted
in deforming it. We have to revise our hasty, intuitive
judgments of people. We are surprised to find that
criminals have their good traits, and we are shocked
at finding serious defects in the characters of those we
have admired and almost worshiped. When I show
pictures to children the first question they ask is, “Is
he a good man, or is he a bad man?” Now there are
a few like Nero or Judas, Abraham or John, that I can
give a definite answer for, but I find it difficult to per-
suade the little chaps that humanity is not painted in
black and white but with infinite gradations of spade

and color.
94

DUAL PERSONALITY 95

Even after a young man has learned by sad experi-
ence that people are really very complex, and that he
cannot always depend on them to do what he expects
them to do, he has a still more startling discovery to
make; that is, that he himself is more complex than
he had supposed and that he cannot always depend on
himself. That is what finally knocks the conceit out of
a man and makes it possible for him to amount to any-
thing. It is a salutary and necessary lesson though a
bitter one. Whether he has been posing as a respecta-
ble man or as a “tough” he finds that his acts are not
consistent with his profession, that it is just as hard
to live consistent to bad principles as to good ones.
He finds out, what was incredible to him before, that
he does things voluntarily that he does not want to do,
that this paradox is a reality. Just as he finds that his
physical constitution, which he thought invulnerable,
gives way at critical moments, so his moral nature
shows unexpected weaknesses that alarm him. He de-
tects himself in unworthy acts that he supposed him-
self incapable of; he does things at which his whole
moral nature revolts.

Now it is a critical period in a man’s life when he
makes the discovery that there are two natures strug-
gling within him. Many a young man when he finds
out that he can never be wholly good, gives up the
struggle and determines that he will be wholly bad, only
to find that the limitations of human nature do not per-
mit that either. He cannot rid himself entirely of
either of the two natures struggling within him. What
he can do is to decide which shall be master and which
the intruder, which one of his two natures he will love

96 THE INTERNAL CONFLICT

or hate, serve or despise. “Religion is the devotion
that half of every individual yields to his other half,
the worship of his more vigorous and heroic by his
more abject and inert aspects.” *

Experimental psychology has given a more definite
and literal meaning to the words of Paul. We now
know that it is possible to separate in an individual two
or more selves which may be quite distinct in character
and ability. One may be dull, the other witty; one may
be peaceable, the other quarrelsome; one kind, the
other mischievous. These may alternately control the
speech and actions of the individual, or they may si-
multaneously manage different parts of the same brain.
An instance of this is found in cases of periodical in-
sanity in which a man leaves his family and friends,
for months leading another life, knowing nothing of his
former self until his return—as we say—to his senses,
to himself. We see the same thing in the periodical
drunkard who acts and feels like another person when
on a spree. He has no shame for what he does under
those conditions, as he does not feel responsible for the
other man. Nothing so weakens the power of the
higher nature over the lower as do alcohol and mor-
phine. Formerly, when people saw these strange
changes by which a sober-minded and respectable man
became for a time a criminal and a lunatic, losing both
his moral and his mental sanity, they said he was ‘“‘pos-
sessed of a devil.” I, for one, do not object to that
phraseology. I think it better than the vague and sen-
timental phrases we have substituted for it. There is
just as much convenience and propriety in personify-

1 Ortega y Gasset.

JEKYLL AND HYDE 97

ing the forces of evil as the forces of good. But it
is out of fashion now to speak of the devil in polite
society—perhaps because it is not good manners to
discuss a person who is present.

Ordinarily, of course, our good and evil tendencies do
not crystallize into distinct selves. They appear merely
as impulses acting on our thoughts and sometimes influ-
encing our acts, so that we “do that which we would
not,” although we do not go so far as to develop a
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde complex.

Within my earthly temple there’s a crowd,
There’s one of us that’s humble, one that’s proud;
There’s one who’s broken-hearted for his sins,
There’s one who unrepentant sits and grins;
There’s one who loves his neighbor as himself,
And one who cares for naught but fame and pelf.
From much perplexing care I would be free

If I could once determine which is Me.

The last line covers the important point, to determine
which of these several selves J will be. That is our
duty, to decide with which of these warring factions
we will ally ourselves, to choose this day whom we
will serve, God or Mammon. It is out of our power to
be pure angel or devil; we have merely to make up
our minds on which side we will fight. That is the way
Paul did. He saw the right, and boldly declared him-
self on that side. Thus he could fight internal evil just
as well as external evil in other people. ‘Now if I
do that which I would not, it is no longer J that do it
but sin that dwelleth in me. For J delight in the law

98 ‘THE INTERNAL CONFLICT

of God, but I see another law in my members warring
against the law of my mind.”

Notice another thing, Paul identifies his sinful nature
with his body and his better nature with his mind. Is
that fair? Are not mind and body equally good or
bad? at least equally important? Some of Paul’s de-
nunciations of the flesh sound harsh to us nowadays; we
suspect him of asceticism. For just now we are in an
age devoted to the glorification of the physical. What-
ever is natural is right, they say, meaning by that what-
ever is dictated by that nature we share with the beasts.
It is an age like that of later Rome when the athlete was
more admired than the scholar. It is the popular phi-
losophy that health implies goodness, and that a sound
body will insure a sound mind. The gymnasium is
advocated as a substitute for both school and church,
and men teach that all that is needed to reform the
criminal in the slums is plenty of soap and water with
a park near by where he can go and look at the pretty
flowers whenever he is tempted to be naughty.

This point of view ignores the fact that it is the
criminal who makes the vicious slums, not the reverse.
Man is not the product of his environment; he creates
his environment. As Plato says, “The soul spins its
own web and weaves its own body.” All efforts to
secure pure food, pure water, and pure air are to be
encouraged, but we must remember that it is as true
today as it ever was that it is not what goeth into the
mouth that defileth a man, but those things that pro-
ceed out of the mouth, come forth from the heart, they
defile a man. Evil is not something that comes to us
from without, from unfavorable circumstances. It has

ORIGINAL SIN 99

its source in our own hearts. Evil exists nowhere but
in the hearts of men. Circumstances may develop it,
but the germ must be there to be stimulated. A tempta-
tion is harmless to one who is not tempted. The for-
tress of Mansoul is never carried by storm; if it falls it
is always due to traitors who open the gates. A man’s
foes shall be those of his own household—yes, even of
his own body. This is expressed by Barnard’s group of
statuary, and by Hugo’s lines, “I feel two natures
struggling within me.”

This evil is born in us; it is an inheritance from our
ancestors. This doctrine of natural depravity, of con-
genital evil, is one that is very obnoxious to modern
taste, which shuts its eyes to everything unpleasant,
and believes only what it chooses to believe. But
that which people most dislike to hear is what they
need to hear the most. If I choose to discuss un-
pleasant topics it is because I am freer to do so than
your pastor would be.

The doctrine of natural depravity was held by the
church through centuries of trial and persecution. To
give it up now when the whole weight of science has
come to its support would be foolishness. According
to the sentimentalists we come into the world trailing
clouds of glory from heaven which is our home. Thank
God, heaven is our future home, not our past home;
man’s destination, not his origin. Rather say: we come
into the world prisoners to sin; dragging after us like
a ball and chain the sins of our ancestors from nobody
knows how far back. It is the body with its inherited,
brutish instincts and passions that draws us backward
and downward; it is our new endowment, the soul, that

100 THE INTERNAL CONFLICT

inspires us to rise. Plato likens a man to a charioteer
driving two horses, one black and fractious ever pulling
downward, the other white, and winged, striving heav-
enward; and it takes a skillful driver to keep such a
team pulling together.

It would not be becoming in an amateur preacher to
settle all the theological problems that have puzzled
the ages, but I will suggest that the question of the
origin of evil is not so dark as it once appeared. Evil
is largely the survival of the unfit. Man is progressing
gradually, and partially; there are no sudden changes.
As the boy outgrows his clothes but has to wear them
even when they get too tight, and inadequate, so we
have the remnants of the ethical garments of antiquity
about us yet.

For good and evil are relative terms, like white and
black, up and down. The virtues of the savage become
the vices of the civilized man. Evil is an anachronism.
Dirt is matter out of place, weeds are plants growing
where they are not wanted, sins are moral weeds and
dirt—mistimed and misplaced acts. The vermiform
appendix and wisdom teeth are physiological sins.
Formerly useful organs, they are now useless, and
therefore dangerous. Satan finds some mischief still
for all our idle organs to do.

Most of our modern vices are virtues that have out-
lived their usefulness. We inherit—and I use the word
in a wider than the physiological sense—we inherit our
domineering temper and haughtiness from the “knights
of old.” It was a virtue with them; it purified the race
and raised it to leadership. It is a vice with us; it is
the source of class hatred, feuds, and caste.

VESTIGIAL VICES 101

We inherit the love of fighting from our Viking an-
cestors. It was a virtue in those days; it regenerated
dying nations. It is a vice now, making us quarrel-
some and offensive, and standing in the way of peace.
Anachronisms are dangerous.

The ancient inhabitants of the shores of the North
Sea were superstitious. They thought fire was a demon
and the wind a spirit. It was a virtue in them. It
led to a belief in an All-Father and a future heaven.
But superstition, having done its work, is now a hin-
drance to progress. It befogs the objects of daily life,
leads us astray into many foolish ways and veils for
us the face of God himself.

It is of course not evil alone that we inherit. From
those medieval knights we get our chivalry and our
sense of honor; from the Vikings our courage and love
of adventure; from the primeval man our endurance and
ability to do hard work. The good we inherit remains
and develops, the evil gradually dies out. Evil is tran-
sitory; good is permanent and immortal.

The battle between good and evil is a part of the
universal struggle between progress and conservatism,
between force and inertia. Not that conservatism is
always wrong; on the contrary it is generally right.
Not all changes are progress, only one, one out of the
many possible. Each new standard of morality shames
the old. But mankind does not march in rank like
soldiers, keeping step together. There are pioneers and
stragglers. Not all those who are living on earth at
the same time are moral contemporaries. ‘There are
veople we see every day still living in the Dark Ages,
with medieval virtues, ideals, and aspirations. Some

102 THE INTERNAL CONFLICT

people are pagan, and some prehistoric, with a natural
code of morality that would disgrace a troglodyte or a
mound builder. Some of our acquaintances are prob-
ably living already in the twenty-first century—if we
only knew which they were.

Not only this, but each individual has different stand-
ards, belonging to various dates, incongruous, incom-
patible, his members warring against one another, and
sometimes he leaves the twentieth century and slips
back to some ruder age or even to the level of the
brutes. There is always a kind of moral gravitation act-
ing to pull us downward and backward. “Onward and
upward” must be our motto. There can be no standing
still. In the words of Christina Rossetti:

“Does the road wind uphill all the way?”
“Yes, to the very end.”

“Will the day’s journey take the whole, long day?”
“From morn to night, my friend.”

We must “move upward, working out the beast, and let
the ape and tiger die.” We must climb on stepping
stones of our dead selves to higher things.

If then we find ourselves born in bondage, endowed
with the sins of our ancestors, what can we do? Can
a man fight successfully against heredity? Well, yes,
to some extent. But there is a better way. Change the
heredity. Adopt a new father and inherit goodness in-
stead of evil. That is the plan recommended in the
chapter that I am merely paraphrasing in modern lan-
guage. *

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they

2 Romans 8:10, 14-17.

ADOPTING GOD AS OUR FATHER 103

are the sons of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs
of God, and joint heirs with Christ.”

We cannot greatly alter the body we were born with,
but we can change our character. We cannot alter our
features but we can change our expression.

We can have help in our climb, in our fight. We
can get inspiration and strength. In the fight of spirit
with flesh we can have the support of the spirit of God.
The more we use this assistance the more assistance we
get. Unto him that hath shall be given. Strength,
either physical or moral, that we do not use is taken
from us. We have all, probably, consciously received
some aid from this source. We do not get more because
we do not use what we have. We do not realize what a
dangerous fight we are in until the moment when the
powers of darkness catch us unaware and overthrow
us.

Now “conversion” is merely this change of allegiance,
of heirship. It is not change of mind, but change of
self. It is not acquiring a new cargo, but shifting the
center of gravity. Sometimes it is coincident with a
change of opinion, but usually not. You simply ally
yourself with the better elements of your nature and
make them dominant. The change may be as sudden
as the change from insanity to sanity. Following this
change, before it can be anything more than a good
intention, must come a life of struggle and develop-
ment. You have put yourself on the right side, you
have yet to make it the winning side.

A little girl once went to Sunday school and they
taught her Paul’s words, “I keep under my body.”
When she returned her mother asked her for the

104 THE INTERNAL CONFLICT

“Golden Text’ and she said, “I keep my soul on top.”
I have sometimes thought the little girl improved the
text. For the best way to eradicate evil is to crowd it
out. The best way to destroy sin is to cultivate virtues.
The wise gardener works to get his crop so flourishing
that it will overshadow the ground and so keep down
the weeds. I do not say that in our moral gardens a
little pruning and weed-pulling are not necessary, but
the main effort should be toward culture rather than
protection. If a man should devote his whole time to
getting rid of his vices, and nothing more, he would
finally succeed in producing only barren soil, devoid of
goodness as well as evil—good for nothing. But he
could not even succeed in getting rid of his vices in
that way, for nature abhors a vacuum. We must sub-
stitute. Interdiction has its place, but substitution is
better. When a new ideal is introduced the old ideal
withers away. The child gets enjoyment from active
play. He wonders who makes the grown people sit still
and talk. As he grows older it is the conversation that
attracts him and he has a distaste for his top and ball.
People who enjoy coarse pleasures cannot understand |
why there are others who do not take part in them.
They do not realize that to persons of refined taste they
are not pleasurable, but painful or disgusting. The
only effective way to stop the reading of pernicious
literature is to stimulate a love for good literature. A
healthy mind gradually outgrows such tastes anyway,
and looks with amusement on the trashy books he was
once so fond of, especially when he notes that the silliest
passages are those he marked and underscored.

The ascetic idea of repression does not develop the

AFFIRMATIVE RELIGION 105

highest type of character. Notice the change in phrase-
ology from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” ‘Thou
shalt not” is the way Moses expressed it. Christ’s
words are, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God....
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The gospel
method is active; the cultivation of virtue, not restric-
tion of vice. Do, instead of do not. The Gospel set
people to doing right instead of escaping wrong. The
lower nature loses its power as we cultivate the higher,
and finally we may say with Tennyson:

“T have climbed to the snows of age and I gaze at a field
in the Past,

Where I sank with the body at times in the sloughs of a
low desire.

But I hear no yelp of the beast and the Man is quiet at
last

As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of
a height that is higher.”

THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

Can ye not discern the signs of the times?—Matthew 16:3.

THE new map of Europe, with its patchwork of iso-
lated nationalities, will look more like the Europe of the
Middle Ages than like the Europe of the nineteenth
century with its vast imperial aggregates and its com-
mercial and cultural internationalism. ‘The medieval-
ism of the modern map reflects the medievalism of the
modern mind. In art, literature, religion, and social
forms we cannot fail to observe a decided reaction to-
ward more primitive modes of thought. It is said that
“revolutions never go backward.” It would be quite
as correct to say that wars always do.

However praiseworthy the main aim of the conflict,
and however complete its triumph, yet war is followed
by a lassitude and lapse in which other gains of civiliza-
tion may be temporarily lost.

The material losses of the Great War are not so seri-
ous as the moral and mental losses. ‘The victorious
nations seem to suffer as much as the defeated nations
from such maladies of the mind. Our own country,
though less and later involved in the war, has not
escaped the contagion.

It would be wrong to ascribe the psychological
changes manifest since the war to the war alone. Per-
haps rather we should say that the war was one of the
symptoms of the prevailing psychology of our times.

106

HOMO EX MACHINA 107

What makes our age different from all the preceding
and invalidates the deductions from history is the pos-
session of inanimate power. Man is drawing upon the
accumulated capital of the millions of years prior to his
advent. In his use of coal and oil he is lighting his
houses and running his machines with the sunshine of
the Carboniferous Era. Science has given each of us,
every man, woman, and child in America, if the appor-
tionment were equal, a train of twenty slaves to wait
upon him night and day.

What this acquisition of inanimate energy might
mean for the advancement of civilization we can hardly
conceive, for of late it has been largely used for the
destruction of civilization.

We have now come to realize that what is done by an
engine depends as much on the character of the engi-
neer as on the power of the machine. Our horsepower
per capita has risen to an unprecedented height. But
has our mindpower per capita increased with it in prv-
portion? If not, this new-found force may prove dan-
gerous to us. The question on which the future de-
pends is whether men can muster up among them
enough mentality and morality to manage the stupen-
dous powers which applied science has recently placed
in their hands. Once upon a time, long before the
oldest of us was born, before any man was born for
that matter—I refer to the Jurassic Era—the ruling
race was composed of creatures much larger and more
powerful than we are. There were giants on the earth
in those days, gigantic saurians which when they stood
up on their hind legs would tower up four times as tall
as aman. But their cranial cavity was smaller than

108 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

ours. The Jurassic saurians had grown too big for
their brains; so they perished.

Now the addition of machine power to the natural
strength of man is equivalent to adding more powerful
arms and legs, more skillful hands, and sharper senses.
It increases his physical capacity but does not directly
enlarge his mental ability. It endows him with a giant’s
strength but does not teach him how to use it.

Among the horrid fancies that haunted the head of
Samuel Butler of Erewhon was a nightmare of a coming
age when the machines that man has made for his serv-
ice should rise in Spartacan revolt and enslave man.
This skit of Butler’s on ‘The Mechanical Creation” is
prought to mind by recent events.

The last few years have made it manifest that in our
civilization the mechanical forces have got ahead of
the moral forces. Man is mounted on a bigger horse
than he can ride. Making war was an efficient process;
making peace is—not. The chemist did his bit with
amazing, even alarming, proficiency. The diplomat fell
down on his job. The physical sciences have evidently
been developed so far beyond the political sciences as to
constitute a menace to civilization. The modern man,
like the Arabian fisherman, has liberated from the
bottle genii that he does not know how to control.

The late War revealed to the horror of the world the
possibilities for destruction that science has placed in
the hands of mortal man. Unless he has undergone a
moral reformation, of which there is no apparent sign,
he is not likely to be deterred from using them by a
paper prohibition. The Prince of the Power of the Air
will be the ruling spirit in the next war—if there is a

THE NEXT WAR 109

next war. It is now possible to send an airplane, with
or without a pilot, by day or night, over the enemy’s
country to sprinkle the ground with a liquid so deadly
that a whiff inhaled or a few drops touching the skin
will cause death. There is no need for fine sighting and
mathematical calculations such as the artilleryman re-
quires; no need to know where the enemy is. The air-
ships or self-propelled projectiles will simply move over
the land, as a farmer’s potato-bug sprinkler goes over
a field, and a certain strip of territory, say half a mile
wide and a hundred miles long, will be instantaneously
depopulated and will remain uninhabitable for days to
come. In the next war, if there is one, there will be no
frontiers, no intrenched line, no exempt cities, no dis-
tinction between combatant and noncombatant. Forti-
fications will be futile, for the wall that will withstand
a forty-two-centimeter projectile is easily penetrable to
a molecule of poison gas. The next war, if there is one,
may be decided without the action of cavalry, infantry,
or artillery. On sea the revolution will be quite as com-
plete. There will be no need to sink ships in the next
war, for the reason that it is not worth while shooting
a riderless cavalry horse.

1 Being merely a layman in military matters, I make the claims
for chemical warfare conservative. Experts may go further;
for instance, Major-General George O. Squiers of the United States
Army, in speaking at the Franklin Institute Centenary, said: “Just
as we now give a harmless anesthetic to an individual for a surgi-
cal operation, so we may be able in the future to put a whole
nation asleep for forty-eight hours, by a combination of new chemi-
cal discoveries with radio-controlled manless airplanes.’ For fur-
ther discussion of the question of the revolution in warfare see the
little book entitled “Callinicus,’ by Dr. J. B. S. Haldane of Cam:
bridge, who was in the British army.

110 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

Can we say that man has reached a moral and mental
maturity so that he can be safely entrusted with such
dangerous weapons? We cannot take them from him
as we can take a revolver from a child. A paper pro-
hibition will not restrain an unscrupulous or desperate
enemy from using any effective weapon. But it is clear
that unless man can learn how to make proper use of
his new-found knowledge he is likely to destroy him-
self. Science has endowed man with the power of a
superman, but his mind remains human, all too human.
He is like a pauper come into a fortune, a laborer who
has been put into the position of boss of the shop, a
private promoted to command the regiment, a slave
made the master of slaves. Man has had no training
for such responsibilities as have now been thrust upon
him. This new command of time and space, this
mastery of unknown forces, this apparition of new
perils, this entrance into untried fields, all these are too
much for man of today. He secretly shrinks and
openly blusters. He alternately cowers and brags.
He lacks confidence in himself and therefore he sus-
pects others. He is afraid of the dark. He is afraid of
his shadow, for that is dark. He shudders with ancient
fears. The modern man is suffering from shell-shock.
He has all the various symptoms. ‘Those who stayed
at home are often worse than those that went over
there. The victorious nations show the same symp-
toms as the defeated.

The causeless suspicions, the sudden hatreds, the
erratic actions, the intolerance of opposing opinion, the
unwillingness to face facts, the return of primitive
modes of thought, the alternations of despair and dis-

BACK TO BARBARISM 111

sipation, the substitution of emotionalism for ration-
ality, the revival of superstition—such are the stigmata
of hysteria and such are the characteristics of our time.

In mental diseases where the conscious will relaxes
and the more recent centers of thought decay, the
patient relapses into a sort of second childhood, using
baby-talk, drawing the crude pictures that he made
when first he took pencil in hand and reverting consci-
ously to the unconscious vices of infancy.

An uprush of infantilism from the unconscious mind
of the human race is dragging the modern world back
to the superstitions, obscurantism, formalism, gargoyl-
ism, and parochialism of the Dark Ages.

Our most advanced artists take as their teachers the
most backward savages surviving on the earth. For-
merly ambitious young painters went to Greece or
Rome to study. Now they journey to Tahiti or the
Congo. Ifa modernist art gallery should be preserved
for several thousand years the archeologist of that day
studying the style would unhesitatingly assign it to
a period prior to, and more primitive than, the Upper
Paleolithic when the Cro-Magnon man depicted the
mammoth and the reindeer on the walls of the caves
of Altamira, 25,000 years ago.

Modern literature, especially poetry, shows marked
reversion to infantile types, in the breaking up of the
logical sentence into disconnected fragments, in the
appearance of nouns without verbs and adjectives with-
out nouns, in the shortened paragraphs, in the ejacu-
latory style, in the overruling of sense by sound, in the
repetitions resembling echolalia and verbigeration.

In music the same reversion to the childhood of the

112 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

race is apparent. The tom-tom sets the pace for
modern progress and the primitive piper calls the tune
to which we dance.

In religion we see a strong reactionary movement, af-
fecting in some degree all the various churches. There
is stricter insistence on creedal requirements, denomina-
tional lines are more rigidly drawn, and heresy trials
are becoming common. Medieval forms and cere-
monies are coming into the very churches that were
originally established as a protest against them. Sects
practicing primitive modes of worship, such as the
Holy Rollers, are gaining rapidly in numbers. Intol-
erance in all forms, racial, sectarian, linguistic, patri«
otic, becomes daily more dominant and bitter. In the
recent national election sectarian issues were more con-
spicuous than ever before.

The movement toward medievalism in art, religion,
industrial organization, and social forms is gaining
ground under the leadership of such brilliant writers
as Gilbert K. Chesterton. It seems as if man, with his
eyes half opened, resents the light. ‘‘Pull down the
curtain,” he shouts to the scientist, “or Pll pitch you
out of the window.” Then he rolls over and pulls the
cover over his head to get another nice long sleep such
as he had from A.D. 300 to A.D. 1200.

The world, like a child at Christmas, is willing to
receive the material gifts of science but refuses its
moral lessons. The world will accept from the hands
of science railroads and radios, soft raiment and for-
eign foods, airplanes and submarines, but turns a deaf
ear when science would talk of peace, efficiency,
economy, foresight, and the frank facing of facts.

LOST LIBERTIES 113

It was commonly supposed that the fights for evolu-
tion and the higher criticism of the Bible which had
absorbed so large a part of the intellectual activity of
the nineteenth century had been virtually won by the
beginning of the twentieth, but we see now a strong
movement against both. The Fundamentalists are en-
deavoring to eliminate the teaching of evolution in the
schools and colleges. It is even proposed to go further
and to prohibit by law the teaching of anything that
offends the religious sentiment or undermines the faith
of any one. Under this law it would be impossible to
teach that the earth is round or that the Indians are
not descendants of the lost Jewish tribes or that there
is any such thing as disease in a school containing a
Dowieite, Mormon, or Christian Science child. Teach-
ing under such circumstances would be one of the
extra-hazardous professions.

We became accustomed to the censorship and the
mass suppression of unpopular opinions during the
war, and the disposition to use such legal and illegal
means for the repression of undesirable views has been
growing ever since. The most remarkable feature of
the situation is that there is almost universal acquies-
cence in the restriction of the rights of free speech and
propaganda for which our ancestors fought and suf-
fered martyrdom.

One of the curious though natural results of the War
is the millennialist movement which is now sweeping
over the country and has appeared in Europe. It is
not due to the influence of one powerful personality,
but has sprung up spontaneously in various churches
and localities, an instinctive outbreak of the folk-psy-

114 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

chology, of a state of mind such as prevailed in the year
1000, when it was commonly believed that the end of
the world was at hand.

Along with the suspicion of science and scholarship
comes a distrust and dislike of modern civilization,
which is built on a scientific foundation. People are
looking with longing eyes back to a primitive paradisial
period, or forward to a rural Utopia, to an Edenic or
Arcadian life. Some would have us take to the woods;
some to the South Seas. ‘Back to Nature” is the
theme of poets, romancers, and even preachers. In
India Mahatma Gandhi heads a powerful movement
for the elimination of machine power and its products.
In Germany the multiform Wandervogel movement
shows a tendency to revert to prehistoric sun-worship
and to discard the customs and costumes of civilized
life.

This revival of the worship of the heathen earth-
goddess, Magna Mater, began in an inoffensive fashion
in the literature of the latter part of the eighteenth cen-
tury and has since infected all classes and countries.
It is now securely enthroned in the two strongholds
that were erected against it, church and school. The
neo-pagan poet Swinburne, who wrote

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;
The world has grown gray from thy breath

was premature in his despair. He might better have
written

Thou hast conquered, O rosy Rousseau;
The world has grown gay from thy breath.

HEATHEN OF THE HEATH 115

Those who say “God made the country but the devil
made the city” are reading history backward. The
word “pagan” means literally “countryman” (paga-
nus). “Civilization” is by self-definition a product of
the city dweller (civis). Our modern nature-lovers
are trying to rob the Creator of credit for the highest
products of creative activity. They would make a
scapegoat of God and drive him out of the town into
the desert. But God is not in the thunder or the whirl-
wind, but in the voice, the artificial creation of man.
It is only by overcoming nature that man can rise.

The cult of naturalism is now dominant everywhere.
The call of the wild is drowning out the appeal of
civilization. “Back to barbarism!” is the slogan of
the hour. Sink into savagery. Praise the country and
denounce the city. Admire cliffs but make fun of sky-
scrapers. Extol forests and despise laboratories.
Exalt the physical and ignore the intellectual. Spend
half a million dollars on a new stadium and let the old
library go to ruin. Abolish compulsory Latin and
establish compulsory swimming. Patronize football
and neglect debating. Up with the soldier and down
with the savant. Promote pugilism and suppress paci-
fism. Jazz your music and cube your painting. Rough-
cast your walls, corrode your bricks, deckle your book-
edges, wormhole your furniture, weather-stain your
woodwork, coarsen your fabrics, and deform your pot-
tery. Condemn everything new and worship every-
thing old. Regenerate obsolescent languages, restore
antiquated spelling, adopt medieval costumes, revive
ancient rituals, inflame traditional animosities, resur-
rect forgotten realms, reérect overthrown barriers. Cul-

116 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

tivate the primitive virtues of personal bravery and
clan loyalty. Reprove and repress the Christian vir-
tues of kindliness and universal sympathy.

Some of the signs of the times I have enumerated
are good things in themselves, some are trifles of no
consequence, but they all hang together and a floating
straw shows the current of a river as well as a log.
A change in taste is often the precursor of a shift of
the trend of human affairs. The dominant tendency
of the times is undoubtedly downward and backward,
and the advance of science and the uplift of religion
have not yet availed to check it.

It is a reactionary spirit, antagonistic to progress
and destructive to civilization. Science and Christian-
ity are at one in abhorring the natural man and calling
upon the civilized man to fight and subdue him. The
conquest of nature, not the imitation of nature, is the
whole duty of man.’

Metchnikoff and St. Paul unite in criticizing the
body we were born with. St. Augustine and Huxley
are in agreement as to the eternal conflict between
man and nature. In his Romanes lecture on “Evolu-
tion and Ethics” Huxley said, ““The ethical progress of
society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process,
still less on running away from it, but on combating
it,’ and again, ‘The history of civilization details the
steps by which man has succeeded in building up an
artificial world within the cosmos.”

Our sins are mostly survivals. Like the vermiform
appendix they are vestigial organs, needing excision.

2This question is discussed in the first chapter of my Creative
Chemistry; in fact it forms the theme of the entire book.

THE WORSHIP OF THE BEAST 117

It is those who believe in perpetuating the pugnacious
propensities of the lower animals and man in his lower
stages who are responsible for these years of war and
the consequent anarchy. Modern literature is tainted
throughout by that most pestilential heresy, zodlatry.
From the child’s primer to the sociological treatise,
animals and insects are held up for our admiration and
imitation.

This pan-pagan spirit has so corrupted our religious
faith in recent years that a biologist is nowadays liable
to be accused of blasphemy if he ventures to point out
the imperfections in the human body or the waste and
useless suffering that prevail throughout the animal
and vegetable kingdoms.

A few centuries ago he would have been accused of
blasphemy if he had said a good word for nature. I
could quote—if anybody would read them—a con-
tinuous series of citations from the church fathers of
every one of the first eighteen centuries of the Christian
era proving that nature was altogether corrupt, vile,
degrading, and accursed; something to be avoided,
fought, subjugated, and eradicated as the only hope of
man’s salvation. The Bible indeed tells us that the
Creator when he first looked over his work pronounced
it “good,” but we know that he later discarded many of
those early models, such as the megalosaurus and the
pterodactyl, in favor of more modern designs; and man
has continued the work of his Maker by improving on
the cattle and fruit trees that he inherited. He has
even made some changes for the better in his own ap-
pearance if we may judge from the pithecanthropus,

118 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

but nothing to boast of compared with what he might
do for himself by a strict course in eugenics.

The real heretic is the man who believes in the infal-
libility of nature and holds that it is the duty of man
to conform to prehuman and subhuman conditions and
conduct, instead of establishing new and higher aims
and activities. John Stuart Mill was for once in his
life orthodox in the strictest sense when he wrote:*

The doctrine that men ought to follow nature... is
equally irrational and immoral. Irrational, because all hu-
man action whatever consists in altering and all useful
action in improving the spontaneous course of nature:
immoral because . . . any one who endeavored in his ac-
tions to imitate the natural course of things would be uni-
versally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.

We should not allow our enjoyment of the beauties
of nature, or our appreciation of the marvelous adap-
tation of natural processes, or our dependence upon
nature for existence, to blind us to the defects of
nature, or to seduce us from our duty to thwart and
subdue nature in so far as she interferes with our as-
pirations toward a higher life and a better social order.
“Nature is the work of the devil,’ says Blake in his
blunt way, and while this may savor of the Manichzan
or Gnostic heresies, it is not far from the view of
Jesus * and of Paul ° that Satan is prince of this world,
and his régime must be overthrown before the kingdom
of God can be established on earth.

3 Three Essays on Religion.

¢ John 12: 313 14:30.

5 Ephesians 2:2; 6:12,

NATURE OUR STEPMOTHER 119

But whether we use the language of ancient theology
er of modern science we must admit the obvious fact
that the best interests of mankind are often in opposi-
tion with those of other creatures, and that the advent
of man, with his vision of the future and his ethical
ideals, brought a new factor into the world which con-
travenes the previously existing system. ‘Mother
Nature” is a fine phrase but misleading. We cannot
forget that she has other children besides us. Na-
ture must love the microbes, for she makes so many of
them. Her smallest offspring are her eldest and her
favorites, and to feed them she does not hesitate to
sacrifice her latest and noblest, man. As for the ethics
of nature, Matthew Arnold put it well in his ‘Sonnet
to an Independent Preacher’’:

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;

Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore:

Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest;

Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave;

Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest.
Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends:
Nature and man can never be fast friends.

Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!

Of all the various definitions of civilization I like
best that of Hellwald:°

“Civilization means the mastering of nature and the
taming of man.”’ The mastering of nature is the task
of science. The taming of man is the task of religion.

6 History of Civilization, 1874.

120 THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

Man has no friends in the world except other men,
and sometimes they are his enemies. As the latest
comer on this planet man finds all the older inhabitants
leagued against him and has to fight for a footing,
sometimes for life. Léon Daudet in a curious and sug-
gestive article on ‘‘Moloch and Minerva” ’ defines
human life as “the totality of the energies that resist
nature.” War, in his point of view, is a periodic re-
venge of nature against man, a kind of moral cata-
clysm, which breaks out whenever man, through the
employment of the forces of nature, threatens to be-
come master of the universe.

Of course man is in a sense a part of nature if we
define nature as meaning everything in the universe.
But that use of the term is so limitless as to be mean-
ingless. So I am using the word in its ordinary sense
to distinguish man and his works from the rest of
creation. For unless we make this distinction we can-
not understand art, science, or religion. Man, by his
unique ability to remember and record the past, to fore-
see the future and to remodel the world, has set him-
self apart from and above other creatures, and the gulf
grows as civilization advances. Art is a mode of
escape from reality into a new world created by the
imagination of the painter, writer, or musician to suit
himself. Science affords the means of transforming
the material world into one more convenient for the
needs of mankind. Religion reveals to us a vision of
a better world and fits man for it by showing him how
he can transform his own nature. All three of these

7 “Moloch et Minerve: La guerre, la nature et Phomme,”’ Revue
universelle, Jan. 15, 1924.

THE GOD OF THINGS AS THEY ARE 121

agencies of civilization are efforts to rise above nature,
and all three have therefore super-natural aims.

He who merely paints things as they are is no true
artist, but a realist. He who is satisfied with things
as they are is no true scientist, but a naturalist. He
who worships the ‘God of Things as They Are” is no
true Christian, but a heathen. The real pessimist
is he who thinks everything is as good as it can be.

Christianity is an exotic plant, a new species of re-
ligion, not natural to the soil and climate of this world
and so requiring constant care and cultivation, lest it
should be overrun and crowded out by native weeds.
The body of man, which he has inherited from the
quadruped, is not adapted to the upright attitude that
man has assumed, and this is the cause of many of our
diseases. The moral nature of man, which he has
inherited from the savage, is not adapted to the ethics
of Christianity, and this is the cause of many of our
sins. Uprightness of the body and righteousness of
the soul are acquired attitudes and therefore difficult to
maintain.

We could not expect that the present tendency to-
ward a blind admiration of nature, that is of the sub-
human and sub-civilized, would be without effect upon
the current standards of morality, and such indeed is
one of the most conspicuous changes manifest in our

times.
One of the changes that we must frankly face is
the rebellion against the code of morals on which our
civilization is based. Formerly those who broke with
the Church were careful to declare that they acted in
the interests of a purer religion and a higher morality.

bey THE GREAT BACKSLIDING

Those who denied the divinity of Christ were loud
in their profession of admiration for the teachings of
Jesus. Now, however, we must recognize that a large
and increasing class of people in every country not
only violate the standards of Christian ethics, but ex-
plicitly repudiate them. Violence is advanced as a
necessity of the class struggle and even as a desirable
thing in itself. Murder is taught as a fine art; the
opium dream of De Quincey has become a reality.
The destruction of property, the smashing of machines,
the damaging of products, the ruination of business,
are urged as a sacred duty. Handbooks on the theory
and practice of sabotage are published. Work is neg-
lected, not merely from natural laziness, but from con-
scientious causes. The violation of contract, the break-
ing of promises, is regarded as the highest ethics.
Hatred is diligently cultivated. Licentiousness is
openly advocated. Altruism is denied as undesirable
or impossible. Sympathy is denounced as a symptom
of weakness and degeneracy. Charity is considered
as a double injury: it curses him that gives and him
that takes. Thrift and industry are classed as vices
instead of virtues. Cursing is commended; drunken-
ness is defended. Family quarrels are encouraged,
and wife-beating is advocated by popular writers of
the day.®

8For example—I mean, for instance—D. H. Lawrence in his
Fantasia of the Unconscious, advising husbands how to treat their
wives, says: “If you hate anything she does turn on her in a fury.
Harry her and make her life a hell, so long as the real hot rage
is in you... . Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious pre-
occupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she is stunned.”
And Nietzsche and Wedekind would say “Amen.”

ANARCHY IN ETHICS 123

Such sentiments in one form or another crop up in
current literature so frequently and in such varied
forms that it is vain to try to suppress them by any
sort of censorship. If it were possible to crush out the
Bolsheviki in Russia, the syndicalists of France, the
anarchists of Italy, the Nietzscheans of Germany and
the I.W.W. of America, there would still persist this
spirit of denial of the established principles of ethics.
It is not merely antichristian; it is clearly antimoral,
for it is a challenge to all that has been regarded as
the code of morality throughout the recorded history of
the human race. The ccde of Hammurabi of Babylon,
the maxims of Ptah-Hotep of Egypt and the laws of
Moses of Sinai show that essentially the same funda-
mental principles of right and justice were held then as
now. In the seven thousand years since, few persons
have questioned them, though many have disregarded
them. The new thing is that now we hear them openly
and emphatically denied and denounced. We can only
hope that the advocates of the new immorality may be
as unsuccessful as the preachers of the old morality in
persuading the people to follow their injunctions.

Perhaps too we can get comfort from Carlyle’s
faith in the future: “Religion in unnoticed nooks Is
weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith to reap-
pear, and bless us, or our sons or grandsons.”

THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live—Exodus 22:18.

There must be none among you who burns his son or his daugh-
ter alive, or who practises divination or soothsaying, no augur, no
sorcerer, no one who weaves spells, no medium or magician, no
necromancer. Any one given to these practices 1s abominable to
the Eternal; indeed, it is on account of such practices that the
Eternal dispossesses these nations before you.—Deuteronomy 18:11-
12 (Moffatt trans.).

RELIGION has been followed all through the ages by
the dark shadow of superstition. Sometimes lengthen-
ing, sometimes lessening; sometimes almost obliterated
by the bright light of reason, sometimes obscuring the
face of religion as by a storm cloud, it still persists and
continues to cast upon our path the distorted and decep-
tive image of the faith we follow.

If certain of our most popular newspapers should by
some unfortunate mischance be preserved to posterity
the archeologist of two thousand years hence would
form about the same sort of idea of our civilization as
we have formed of the civilization of ancient Assyria
from the cuneiform tablets. He would conclude from
reading these papers that astrology was more in vogue
than astronomy, that our medicine was mostly magic,
that the credulity of the common people was boundless,
that the practice of necromancy, divination, and other
forms of witchcraft provided popular and profitable
professions.

The reversion to more primitive modes of thought
124

MODERN CREDULITY 125

that is characteristic of the post-war period shows it-
self in the double trend toward naturalism and toward
supernaturalism. These tendencies are not opposed,
as they may appear, but lead in the same direction, and
both lead away from a rational religion and a sensible
science. Naturalism leads to the admiration and imita-
tion of the subhuman and subcivilized, and supernatur-
alism in its present form is also turned backward toward
the worst aspects of paganism, instead of forward to
a higher type of humanity and superior social order, as
true supernaturalism should be turned.

The modern believer is disposed to repudiate the
saints and prophets and to pin his faith on Sir Oliver
Lodge and Eusapia Palladino. Amulets and charms
are again in fashion. The ouija board rivals the type-
writer in the production of literature. Palmistry is a
popular pursuit. A mint of money has been made out
of those who were willing to believe that the disease,
sex, religion and race of a distant patient could be de-
termined by electronic oscillations of a drop of blood
or ink. Rain-making, one of the earliest of the magic
arts, is today a profitable profession. Speaking with
tongues, which Paul tried to eradicate from the church
of Corinth, is a growing practice in certain of our
sects. As David Starr Jordan says: “War lifted the
lid on society, and secret actions and beliefs held in
the dark now dance openly on every green.”

Rosicrucianism has had a renaissance. The old
Roman method of divination by the pendulum has been
revived and apparatus consisting of a ball on the end
of a thread is being sold for $2.00 to determine the sex
of a chicken from the egg. The thirteenth seat in the

126 THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

parlor car is hard to sell, and the thirteenth floor is
eliminated from some of our newest hotels. Witchcraft
has appeared again in the courts. In a recent French
trial personal testimony and experimental evidence were
brought forward in court to prove that the accused had
killed people by sticking pins into their wax figures.
Satan worship has become a cult and the Black Mass
is celebrated in Paris. That Lord Carnarvon was the
victim of Tutankhamen’s curse is commonly believed.
Bleeding images appear in Ireland * and weeping virgins
in France.? We see pictures of them in our papers.
Necromancy, or communion with the spirits of the dead,
is the fashionable faith of the hour. Sir Conan Doyle,
doctor and detective, has published photographs of
fairies. The Great War was most prolific in miracles.
Volumes have been written on the visions and legends
of this war. St. George and St. Jeanne d’Arc made up
their ancient quarrel and fought on the same side, as
numerous witnesses attest. In 1914 it was believed by
many of the French people and soldiery, and even by
some of their officers, that the sudden and mysterious
shift of von Kluck’s forces to the east, which allowed
Foch to strike at his exposed center and so saved Paris,
was due to the apparition of Saint Joan with an army
on the left of the invaders. The angels of Mons formed
the theme of many a sermon and learned article, and the
fact that the vision was traced back to a short story by
Arthur Machen in a London daily did not shake faith in
1 At Templemore, 1920.

2“Le Procés de la Vierge qui pleure,’ Mercure de France, Oct.
1920.

MYTHS OF THE GREAT WAR 27

it. The 80,000 Russian soldiers who were transported
from Archangel to Scotland and down through Eng-
land to France early in the war, were said to have
been seen by many people en route. One lady who
reported seeing them in a railway station said she
knew they were Russians because “they wore their
cossacks.” It seems this legend originated in
the fact that the supply of Russian eggs was cut
off when Petrograd was blockaded, and so the ex-
porter telegraphed to the London house ‘80,000 Rus-
sians shipped via Archangel.”’ Drake’s drum was heard
again on the Devon shore as it had been prophesied that
it would be in England’s hour of peril. Lord Kitch-
ener’s mysterious disappearance gave rise to many wild
legends that still persist. It is evident that Kitchener of
Khartum has joined the immortal band of national
heroes whose return is expected by their faithful ad-
mirers: Barbarossa, Arthur, Roland, Drake, Charle-
magne, Dmitri, Marko Kralyevich, Quetzalcoatl—I
know there are some others, but I can’t think of them
just now.

There are various explanations advanced to explain
the remarkable recrudescence of superstition since the
war. Here is one by George S. Snoddy, Professor of
Psychology in the University of Utah.

The present trend toward mysticism, spiritism and the
occult is directly due to the instability of mind produced
by the world war. When the habits of thought slowly built
up by looking at the world from certain definite points of
view are quickly disintegrated through intense excitement

128 THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

or shifting of viewpoints, there is temporary instability and
a return to the cause-and-effect sequences of primitive man;
hence spiritism.*

But whether we can explain it or not the revival of
superstition is one of the most striking and alarming
symptoms of our times, especially since it seems to arise
from a world-wide folk-movement. In England it is
reported that “during the last ten or twelve years there
has been a remarkable recrudescence of the amulet, or
mascot.” * From Germany I recently received a
learned pamphlet foretelling the imminent end of the
world, with illustrations in color of the sun streaked
with blood and the moon darkened. A distinguished
chemist in Berlin writes me:

The Wandervogel Movement is one of the many mani-
festations of the spiritual inquietude of our time. Since
the war a wave of uncertainty is sweeping over the old
world. Theosophy, Spiritualism, Mazdaznan, Yogiism and
various other symptoms of mania have each a community
in all the large cities. We get an impression reminding us
of the time when the Old Greek Polytheism was slowly
disappearing and Christendom had not yet come in. Per-
haps something quite new is on the march. In two hun-
dred years from now the world will have a very different
look.

The railroad news stands sell astrologies but no as-
tronomies. ‘The daily horoscope is a popular feature

3 Quoted by Joseph Jastrow in “Spiritualism and Science,” in the
American Review of Reviews.
*See leader on “Modern Credulity,” in Nature, Aug. 4, 1921.

THE RETURN OF THE DEMONS 129

of many of our newspapers and if it is omitted from a
single issue floods of letters come to ask for the missing
number. Government officials, prominent politicians,
and financiers are said to guide their affairs by the
stars.° Perhaps that accounts for the way things are
run.

American missionaries sent over to China and Korea
to convert the heathen become themselves converted
to the prevailing demonology and bear testimony to
the efficacy of exorcism.® A writer in a leading British
review ascribes the wars and violence of the twentieth
century to the throng of vampire spirits of those who,
cut off from life suddenly and prematurely, seek to
satisfy their lust or vengeance through the living.’ It
is a gruesome picture he presents:

Think of the enormous pressure which this mass of living
“dead’ must exercise, is at this moment exercising, upon
us! Think how easy it is to account, on this ground alone,
for many of the crimes and errors of the human race! For
we have the whole past of the human race encumbering us
and pressing upon us; pressing upon us, not with any mere
inert weight of historic precedent, but with the active force
of numberless distinct, conscious, passionate personalities,
all dying of hunger and thirst, so to speak, and all strenu-

5 For an account of the alleged influence of Madame Marcia, the
astrologer, on the career of President Harding see Collier’s, May
16, 1925.

6 See “Demon Possession,” by Rev. John L. Nevius, and “Korean
Devils and Christian Missionaries,” by David K. Lambuth, Inde-
pendent, Aug. 1, 1907, where quotations from the letters of fifteen
missionaries are given.

7“Optimism or Pessimism?” by George Barlow, in Contemporary
Review.

130 THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

ously endeavouring to appease that hunger, to assuage that
thirst, by taking possession of and using the still warm-
blooded, still available, frames and nervous systems of the
living!

The war revived the pagan practice of rhabdomancy,
and the magic wand was used to find water on both
sides the line. In 1920 two books were published in
Paris ° in defense of its powers and in 1921 the French
Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to study it.
Germany has a weekly periodical devoted to the art.°

The forked twig of witch-hazel and more pretentious
divining rods are still much employed in the United
States to discover water, oil, gold, and lost articles.

Witchcraft is a disease of the imagination, but it is
not an imaginary disease. Quite the contrary, it is a
serious malady and very difficult to cure, especially
when it becomes epidemic. Church and state united to
stamp it out four hundred years ago, but their most
severe measures were unavailing. We must in justice
to our ancestors remember that although there never
was really any such thing as witchcraft there really
were witches, that is, malignant old women and evil-
minded men who believed that they had and were
believed by the community to have supernatural power
to persecute their neighbors. It therefore was not un-
natural that the Government should impose upon such
undesirable citizens the same penalty applied in those

8 By Mager and Landesque. See La Nature, June 4, 1921.

9 Die Wiinschelrute. For the history of the subject see “On the
So-Called Divining Rod,” by Prof. W. F. Barrett, in Proceedings

of the Society for Psychical Research, Vols. XIII and XV. The use
of the divining rod is condemned in Hosea 4:12.

TELEPATHIC MURDER 131

days to such minor misdemeanors as catching a hare
or cutting down a tree on a private estate, namely, capi-
tal punishment. But, although not unnatural, this
policy of suppression was obviously unwise, because the
more witches were found guilty and executed the more
people believed in witchcraft. If the courts confirmed
it who could doubt it? A delusion cannot be extracted
from the brain by forceps from without like a bullet.
It has to be expelled from within by direct action of
the patient himself. It is a case of auto-intoxication
and the only remedy is auto-expurgation.

The general atmosphere is becoming so foggy with
superstition that we may expect a revival of witchcraft
mania and persecution to break out at any time even in
our own enlightened land.

William Jennings Bryan, dying at the close of his
fight against evolution at Dayton, Tenn., is thought
by many to have been “mentally assassinated by the
hypnotic animus of anti-Christ, expressed principally
through Roman Catholic pagans and anti-Christian
Jews.” *° The spread of a popular belief in the possi-
bility of exercising a malign influence at a distance by
occult power has been found favorable in all ages to an
outbreak of an epidemic of witchcraft.

I recently met a young university woman who was
doing extension work in a rural community where the
purest Anglo-Saxon breed prevails, and who had been
driven out with a shotgun on the ground that she taught
witchcraft. She had been telling fairy stories to the
children, and the local authorities argued that these
stories were either false, in which case she was a liar, or

10 The American Standard, Aug. 1 and July 1, 1925.

132 THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

they were true, in which case they were witchcraft.

The last prosecution under the witchcraft law in
England took place in 1904, when Sir Alfred Harms-
worth, editor of the Daily Mail, instituted proceedings
against Professor and Madame Keiro, palmists and
crystal gazers. The jury found them guilty both of
fortune telling and of obtaining money under false pre-
tenses, but the judge only took into consideration the
latter count and suspended sentence at that. Instead
of burning witches we advertise them.

It may be thought that our proficiency in science and
engineering will prevent any such recrudescence of su-
perstition; but history does not give us hope of im-
munity. Magic flourished in Mesopotamia at the time
the Babylonians were raising skyscrapers that alarmed
high heaven. The Romans consulted the entrails of
animals when they laid the aqueducts and sewers of
Rome. There are today more believers in magic, nec-
romancy, astrology, divination, and other forms of
witchcraft than there ever were. They may not form
so large a proportion of the population as they did in
ancient Assyria and Rome or medieval Europe, but
they are more numerous because the population is much
greater.

Science rules in the laboratory and the machine shop.
It does not yet hold sway over the mind of the people.
The extension of science teaching in the public schools
does not seem to have increased the liking and respect
for science as much as was anticipated before it was
introduced. ‘This is an age of science but not a scien-
tific age. David Starr Jordan of Stanford points out
that:

A SAFER WORLD FOR FOOLS 133

The recent recrudescence of superstition, a striking ac-
companiment of an age of science, is in a sense dependent
on science. Science has made it possible. The traditions
of science are so diffused in the community at large that
fools find it safe to defy them. Those who take hallucina-
tions for realities; those whose memory impressions and
motor dreams a defective will fails to control; those who
mistake subjective sensations produced by disease or dis-
order for objective conditions—all these sooner or later
lose their place in the line. In falling out, they take with
them the whole line of their possible descendants. .. . If
all men sought healing from the blessed handkerchief of
the lunatic, or from contact with old bones or old clothes;
if all physicians used “revealed remedies” or the remedies
“Nature finds” for each disease: if all business were con-
ducted by faith: if all supposed “natural rights’ were rec-
ognized in legislation, the insecurity of these beliefs would
speedily appear. Not only civilization, but civilized man
himself, would vanish from the earth. The long and
dreary road of progress through fool-killing would for cen-
turies be traversed again. That is strong which endures.
Might does not make right, but that which is right will
justify itself as the basis of race stability.“

In fact the machinery of science may be employed to
defeat the aims of science, as the spread of the power
of Christian nations has multiplied the number of
heathen. Opportunity does not insure progress. Chris-
tian missionaries like Livingstone rejoiced over the
opening up of Africa by commerce and communications
because they naturally and naively assumed that it
meant the advance of Christianity. On the contrary it
led to an unprecedented spread of Mohammedanism,

11 The Stability of Truth, p. 57.

134 THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

their most formidable foe. The printing press contrib-
utes to the propagation of superstition and obscuran-
tism as well as to the promulgation of religion and
science. In our books and magazines fiction outweighs
fact by many thousand tons. Radio has given Voliva
the chance to broadcast his gospel of a flat earth from
WCBD, Zion City, all around the world. Radio has
also afforded an opportunity for a new form of an
ancient mode of divination, the sortes Homerice or
sortes Biblice. Instead of opening by chance a volume
of the Iliad or the Bible and taking the first passage the
eye lights upon as a message from heaven, the up-to-
date occultist when in doubt or distress goes to the radio
receiver with the eyes shut and turns the dials till he or
she hears a fragment of speech or song that may be in-
terpreted as an answer to the problem or a guide to ac-
tion.

It is almost hopeless to combat a widespread wave of
superstition. Its causes are unknown and its course is
incalculable. It is cosmic in its scope, and no nation,
perhaps no individual, can altogether escape its infu-
ence while the pendulum of the world’s thought is on its
backward swing. The best any one can do is to give
his own brain a thorough housecleaning at least once a
year, peering into every dark corner, wiping out the
medieval dirt, and burning up every rag of superstition
that may serve to shelter and to spread the pandemic.

Housecleaning time, when every article of furniture
from cellar to garret is handled and dusted, occurs tra-
ditionally each spring. An annual purification of the
spiritual nature, when we overhaul and furbish up our
morals, is set by liturgical churches in Lent and by

MIND-CLEARING TIME 135

other churches with similar regularity in the revival
season following the Week of Prayer. The systematic
cleansing of our bodies is placed on the calendar as a
regular order of business at diurnal or at least hebdom-
adal intervals. But there is no set period for intel-
lectual purification, and, naturally enough in the stress
of daily work, this is neglected.

Yet it is quite as important to keep our minds in good
condition as our houses, our consciences, or our bodies.
A false belief may make more trouble in the world than
a wrong intention. No priest or church has ever ex-
aggerated the importance of a right creed. The only
faults of the heresy hunters are in their narrow defini-
tion of orthodoxy and the strenuous methods they adopt
for securing it. A little lying is a dangerous thing,
especially if you get the habit. Cherish no illusions;
they are liable to change into delusions. Have no blind
spots in your eye except those you were born with.

Errors breed errors. They multiply like microbes,
especially through neglect. A single false belief may
infect all the sound facts you pile in on top of it.

It may not take so much time for the annual inven-
tory of your ideas as you may think, but in any case it
is worth doing. Take down each principle and funda-
mental theorem from the shelves, valuate it and see
that it is in sound condition, not worm-eaten or moth-
bitten or rusty or out of date. One can never know
when he is going to need one of his ideas, but when he
does, it must be in serviceable condition. Very few of
us have so wide a range of intellectual activity that all
our ideas are kept bright from frequent use. We have
to go around and polish them up occasionally. Don’t

136 THE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

hesitate to send your antiquated mental machinery to
the scrap heap and to put in new. The mind is a
thought factory, not a museum of antiquities.

Oh, the road to En-dor is the oldest road
And the craziest road of all!
Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode,
As it did in the days of Saul,
And nothing has changed of the sorrows in store
For such as go down on the road to En-dor! 7”

12 Rudyard Kipling.

THE USES OF ADVERSITY

Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son
whom he receiveth.—HEBREWS 12: 6.

WHEN modern science began to examine critically
the ladder by which man has climbed to his present
position it was found that every step was stained with
blood; that life was war, and suffering the common lot
of all; that animals preyed upon plants, and man upon
animals and bacteria upon man, a cycle of suffering;
that every species was an Ishmael; that birds and but-
terflies were not the careless, joyous things the poet
thought them, living only for beauty and pleasure, but
were engaged in a terrible struggle for existence; that
the song of birds was a war-cry and the adornment of
the butterfly was merely war-paint. It was found that
there was awful waste in nature, waste of time, waste
of work, waste of life. Of a million seeds sown by the
wind only one lived. A thousand eggs were cast upon
the waters to produce one fish. A hundred men labored
and sweat that one might rise. It was an awful revela-
tion, that of science fifty years ago. No wonder that it
drove men insane; made them pessimists, atheists. If
science had stopped here it would have been a gospel of
despair.

But it did not stop; another step changed it to a
gospel of hope. It was discovered that this suffering,
that looked to a casual glance like an impediment to

progress, was really its cause; that pain was the main-
137

138 THE USES OF ADVERSITY

spring of the universe; that war was.the mother of all
things, as the Greek had said long ago; that the rod of
affliction was the modeling tool by which God created
all living things; that there could have been no happi-
ness now if there had been no suffering in the past; that
joy is the offspring of sorrow, out of war comes peace
and through death comes life. This changed the whole
view. It put optimism in the place of pessimism. Man
could see the uses of adversity.

There was a time when there was no suffering in the
world. But that was when there was no life; when the
earth was without form and void and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. With life came suffering,
which increased as life increased. Progress may be
defined as increase in the capacity for suffering. A
stone does not feel pain, possibly a plant does. Ancient
animals suffered less than their descendants. ‘The gi-
gantic saurians that used to creep across our western
plains were as big as a house, but their brains could
have been put into a teacup. Not much chance for
pain there. And finally man came, a creature built
upon a new and improved plan; but his chief endow-
ment was that he was able to suffer more. Several new
kinds of suffering were invented expressly for him. He
alone of all the animals suffers in anticipation of coming
perils, and grieves over the errors of the past. It is the
greater capacity for misery that has made men what
they are. These are they who have come up out of
great tribulation.

The earliest animals were built to avoid suffering.
They were as big as an animal could be and walk. The
sensitive parts were protected, as in our modern iron-

DEATH AN AID TO LIFE 139

clads, by defensive armor as thick as could be carried;
hide and scales almost impenetrable. Now these ani-
mals are all extinct. They were beaten in the struggle
for existence, and by what? By little animals with the
nerves on the outside. The animals that were easiest
hurt conquered those that were most protected. Now
our museums are filled with the relics of these obsolete
forms, models of inventions that did not work well, as
on the walls is hanging the armor of the knights of the
Middle Ages, who were beaten by men without armor.
The best protected animal now in existence is the clam;
the least protected is the man. To try to escape suffer-
ing is not a good plan. It has been tried on a large
scale, and it does not work. Don’t be a clam.

There was a time when there was no death in the
world. This was long after the creation of living be-
ings; if by death we mean a definite and certain period
of life. The protozoa, the simplest organisms, are im-
mortal. They do not die a natural death, although
they can be killed. These tiny specks of protoplasm
grow and divide, but we cannot say that one part is
the parent of the other. It is the same individual, only
separated into two parts for convenience. It lives and
grows as long as the proper conditions prevail; not
merely for threescore years and ten, but for thousands
of years. In fact, the first created speck of protoplasm
is. living yet, divided into innumerable parts. Later
there came beings that died—spontaneously, at the end
of a given time. It was apparently a great disadvan-
tage that an animal should die when it had acquired the
strength and skill of maturity, and that a new individual
should have to pass through the period of helpless in-

140 THE USES OF ADVERSITY

fancy. But the animals that died progressed and devel-
oped, while those that did not die remained stationary.
Death came into the world that we might have a fuller
and completer life.

Now we see more clearly what is meant by the many
mysterious sayings in the Bible, that benefits arise
from afflictions, that good comes out of evil, and life
comes from death. People used to believe these state-
ments; yes, they were doubtless true, but in some hazy
mystical sense, nobody knew how. Now we know that
they are not imaginative, but plain statements of fact;
they are not figurative, but literally true.

We now know something of the benefits of suffering
in the past, but why do we have to suffer? We see
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in
pain till now, because it has brought forth ws—but why
does the labor continue? Here is man; intelligent man,
who knows some things and thinks he knows it all;
civilized man, except for occasional lapses into bar-
barism; man who stands erect, except when he crawls
into some meanness; man with the moral law written in
his heart, which he follows whenever he thinks it is
good policy; man, who knows God and prays to him
whenever he gets into trouble; man, proud man, looks
up to his Creator and says: “Here am I, the end and
aim of all the creation. I am worth all the pain and
suffering that I have cost other beings, but don’t carry
this any further. Let us have peace.”

This is no caricature. You will find substantially
this view of the position of man in dozens of theological
and scientific works. Of all created beings man is cer-
tainly endowed with the greatest capacity for conceit.

DO UNTO OTHERS 141

Where knowledge ends, faith begins. The more we
know of God’s dealings in the past, the better is our
foundation for our faith in the future. No suffering has
been in vain; so ours, too, must have its use. We are
now reaping the reward of the sufferings of others. Our
happiness has its roots in a soil watered by the tears of
untold generations. Animals and men, innocent and
guilty, have suffered for us. They gave themselves as
living sacrifices for a people they were not to see, for a
_ cause they did not know.

What are we going to do about it? How can we
repay the sacrifices that others have made for us?
Christ has told us. By sacrificing ourselves for others,
for those around us and those who are to follow, for our
neighbors and our posterity. We are to do for others
what others have already done for us. We are to take
up the cross, Christ’s cross, the symbol of unmerited
suffering, the emblem of sacrifice for others, and fol-
low him.

LOOKING BACKWARD AND LIVING FORWARD

(A Baccalaureate Sermon)

| This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind,
and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press to-
ward the mark—Philippians 3: 13-14.

OBVIOUS as it is, it seems strange that we are so con-
structed that we have knowledge only of the things that
are of no use to us, the things of the past, and have no
knowledge of the things that we are to use, the things
of the future. We are told to look before we leap, but
this, like other Die advice, is literally impossible
to foto

Our life is ahead of us, and this is as true of the old
as of the young. Our actions, our thoughts, our inten-
tions, our desires are necessarily directed toward the
future. We have no control over the past, and so we
have little interest in it. We front one way. There
was a little girl who made that discovery for herself.
Her mother was trying to teach her the art of buttoning
her dress behind, which, I am told, is an art very diffi-
cult of acquirement. The little girl gave the reason for
it. “Why, mamma, how can I? I’m in front of my-
self.”

Now it seems a desirable arrangement on the whole,
that our eyes, our arms, and our feet should all work
in the same direction, that is, forward. It is only in

emergencies like that referred to that it is awkward.
142

MR. FACING-BOTH-WAYS 143

But when we come to consider how we are placed in
time we find that it is different from space. Our action
is still directed forward but our look is directed back-
ward. It seems as if a mistake had been made in man’s
construction, as if his head had been set wrong upon
his shoulders, like the mismatched animal we used to
draw in collaboration by folding over the paper. He
can only walk forward and can only look backward.
He can never see where he is going, only where he has
been. He wants to see the road ahead of him and he
can only gaze on his own footprints, often a dishearten-
ing spectacle. I know of nothing so awkward except
a man rowing a boat who must look at his wake instead
of his port.

The ancients, struck by this anomaly in man’s con-
stitution, imagined beings not so hampered; the twin
giants, Prometheus who looked forward and Epime-
theus who looked backward; Janus who had two faces,
directed toward past and future.

But while mythology was dreaming of beings better
adapted to their temporal environment, science was
endeavoring to overcome the difficulty by devising
means by which man could get some glimpses of the
road in front of him. It may be said that the intellec-
tual history of mankind is a record of the efforts made
by man to screw his head around on his shoulders so
he could look before as well as after. The highest
achievement of the human mind is the development of
the power of prophecy. It is no wonder that we are
fond of saying, “I told you so.” It is the proudest
boast that one can make.

Knowledge of the future is the most useful knowl.

144 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

edge we can have. Indeed, it is the only useful knowl-
edge we can have. Reading history is as unsatisfac-
tory as reading a guide book to Japan when we are go-
ing to Switzerland. There is no guide book to that un-
known land into which we are to travel. We would
prefer to read history of the United States from 1926
to 1976, rather than any other period since the world
began. Our own biographies would be more interest-
ing to us than the biography of the greatest man who
ever lived. But the history of the period 1926 to 1976
is not to be studied by us. It has to be made by us.
All the world’s a stage and we come on to this stage
with our parts unlearned, with no knowledge of our
cues, with only a faint conception of our own role or the
roles of the other actors, for we have never heard the
plot of the play and never have had a rehearsal. If
under those circumstances we can make a creditable
appearance and performance, what skillful actors we
must be! The drama of life requires a nimbleness of
wit like that of the early Italian plays, where parts were
assigned but the dialogue and action had to be extem-
porized.

You can buy today’s paper for two or three cents,
get yesterday’s paper for nothing. If you could buy to-
morrow’s paper for $100 you would jump at the chance.
It would be a better bargain than today’s paper at
two cents. Let us assume that you have a chance to
buy tomorrow’s daily. Not a whole and perfect copy
but a scrap, a part of a page, not a well printed copy,
but a smudged and almost illegible imprint, not abso-
lutely accurate either, but, like yesterday’s paper, con-
taining many false statements and mistakes. Even that

NEWSPAPER PROPHETS 145

would be worth something, would it not? Well, that is
about what you can get now. For our newspapers are
now part of prophecy, and some of it true prophecy.
The paper today tells what the weather will be tomor-
row, and it hits it right about eighty per cent of the
time. It tells us when the sun will rise and the tide will
fall to the second. It tells you what meetings and din-
ners are going to be held, generally correctly. It tells
whether stocks are going up or down, though I do not
advise you to place any financial dependence on that.
It tells you which party is going to win in the next elec-
tion and is right half of the time. It even goes so far
as to foretell what sort of clothes the ladies are going
to wear next season, which has always seemed to me
the most wonderful manifestation of the power of
prophecy.

I do not mean to exaggerate the prophetic power of
editors. JI would merely call your attention to the
fact that it is a part of the journalistic work and the
most important and the most difficult part of it. A
paper or magazine that is always foretelling things that
do not come to pass is discredited, or ought to be more
often than it is. A periodical is of value to us in so far
as it is able from the fullness of its information and the
prescience of its editors to give some idea of what is
likely to happen. Some things are and always will be
beyond the power of the wisest men, even editors. It
is easier to predict big things than little. It is easier to
predict consequences than causes. No one predicted
long in advance that a Serbian fanatic would assas-
sinate an Austrian archduke, but many predicted the
war.

146 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

Men who have done most in the world have been the
men who had that insight which is foresight, who could
read the signs of the times and reason from cause to
effect, men who could screw their heads around a little
more than the rest of us and catch a glimpse of what
is before us. Such a man can use his power for self-
advancement or for the benefit of all. He may bet
on the races, or speculate in real estate or go into poli-
tics, and win fortune or fame for himself. Or he may
become a public prophet, working for the public profit,
if you will permit me to put it so, telling people what
good results will come from the adoption of a certain
policy, or, warning them of the evil consequences of
present tendencies, more often the latter, for somehow
it is always easier to prophesy bad fortune than good.

The earliest records in Egypt and Chaldea, painted on
papyrus or stamped on clay, show that at the very be-
ginning of civilization men’s faces were hopefully turn-
ing toward the future, too hopefully in fact, for it has
taken many thousand years of steady thought and ob-
servation to clear away the rubbish they heaped up,
to find out we don’t know so much as they thought
they did, the soothsayers, and magicians and astrologers
of old. But we should do honor to these wise men of
Chaldea and Egypt for what they tried to do and what
they did. They were the first scientists, for the essence
of science is prophecy. Think what a bold act of faith
that was to be the first to assert that 2 times 2 will make
4—not have made 4 or make 4 but will everywhere
and always and for all. And then that unknown genius
who made that still higher flight into the unknown and
boldly announced his belief that 12 times 12 would

ASTROLOGY AND ASTRONOMY 147

make 144. He made good, and mankind thereby
stepped upward to a higher plane, standing henceforth
upon the multiplication table.

Now among the clay tablets that record these won-
derful things about numbers and equally strange things
about angles and squares and circles, are found other
prophecies of varying value, telling how long next year
would be and when the next eclipse was coming; also
directions for finding out when the king was going to
die and who was going to beat in the war. This is
where these ancient seers went astray. They were
tempted to pretend to know more about the future than
they did, even as you and I are tempted now. The
king and the common man did not care so much about
the next eclipse as about how to make money and
whether she would marry him or not. So the wise men
of the East applied their astronomical knowledge to
the affairs of men and it did not work, but they pre-
tended it did because it was profitable. It was found
that men did not move in simple orbits like the stars.
So their science was split into two parts; astronomy,
the part that worked and that we have kept to this day,
and astrology, the part that did not work and nobody
believes in now except those who are still living in the
Chaldean age. But don’t blame the astrologers for
trying to foretell deaths and marriages as well as
eclipses and conjunctions; only blame them for holding
on to the idea after they knew it would not work. Let
me here give you a piece of practical advice. Look out
for two things—pick up an idea at the right time and
drop it at the right time. Just follow this simple rule
and you will get along all right. The seers and augurs

148 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

made a mistake that is often made yet, when a man
thinks that he can explain all of biology by the laws
of chemistry and all of sociology by biology. They
made this common mistake of carrying a thing too far.

Science, then, had its origin in the effort to predict
the future; and that remains its present purpose, its
reason for existence. There is a strong contrast at this
point between the temperament of the scientist and that
of the historian or, let me say rather, the antiquarian;
for a historian may have the scientific temperament.
Both are inevitably confined to the study of what has
happened, but the scientist picks out from the multi-
tudinous records of the past only what seems to
him likely to be repeated in some similar form in
the future, while the antiquarian is interested es-
pecially in what can never happen again. The
antiquarian values things according to their rarity.
The scientist values things according to their common-
ness. The antiquarian values a book that is unique, an
event that is unique. The scientist has no use at all for
an event that is unique, if there can be such a thing.
He is searching for the common element in the rare ob-
jects he is studying; the common factor in all happen-
ings. Poincaré says that mathematics is the art of
giving the same name to different things. The more
universal a law, the more highly it is prized. Newton
is esteemed one of the greatest scientists because he dis-
covered the greatest commonplace, the law of gravita-
tion that drops an apple on a man’s head and pulls the
planets into their orbits. Iron is the commonest thing
in the world; that is why it is so valuable. Water is
worth more than wine. The diamond is the least valu-

THE ANTIQUARIAN SPIRIT 149

able form of carbon. Wisdom is more to be sought
than rubies and fine gold, because when it is found
there is always enough of it to go around. Nobody can
monopolize it.

The antiquarian seeks the exception. The scientist
seeks the rule. The antiquarian wants a variety. The
scientist wants the common weal. The antiquarian
searches for a curiosity. The scientist has a curiosity
that makes him search.

This distinction between the historical and the scien-
tific point of view is important because it lies at the
basis of the mutual misunderstanding and mistrust,
sometimes rising to the point of antagonism, between
these two wings of a college faculty. The historian
seems to the scientist to value facts for their own sake,
while the scientist goes after the facts that seem likely
to have a bearing upon some universal principle that
may be applied in the future. A glaring example of the
extravagances of the antiquarian spirit is to be found
in the article on “Typography” in the Encyclopedia
Britannica, where twenty pages of its valuable space
are taken up by a discussion, based upon an enormous
amount of scholarly research, of the claims of Guten-
berg and Coster for priority in the use of movable
type. Of course no one can tell what fact may turn
out to be significant, but I confess I cannot conceive
that finding out when or where or by whom the first
page of type was set could have any possible bearing
on what history can teach us about the nature and
destiny of the human race. It is too late to apply for
a patent on printing. Printing is one of the most im-
portant factors in the history of the world, but do we

150 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

really need to know anything more about its origin
than that “books printed from movable type were
published in Germany and the Netherlands about 1445-
14557?

The difference of attitude between the scientist and
the historian is admirably illustrated by Poincaré, the
French mathematician :*

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones.
But a collection of*facts is no more a science than a heap
of stones is a house.

And above all the scientist must foresee. Carlyle has
somewhere said something like this: “Nothing but facts
are of importance. John Lackland passed by here. Here
is something that is admirable. Here is a reality for which
I would give all the theories in the world.” ? Carlyle was
a fellow countryman of Bacon; but Bacon would not have
said that. That is the language of the historian. The
physicist would say rather: “John Lackland passed by
here; that makes no difference to me, for he never will
pass this way again.”

Antiquarianism is exclusive; science is democratic.
The one treasures; the other shares. We can see the
effect of the antiquarian spirit most conspicuously in
the sale of old books and objects of art. The first and
poorest edition brings more than the latest and best.
An only copy of a book that is not worth republishing
may sell for thousands of dollars. The trick of the
Cumezan sibyl, who burnt part of her books to raise

1 Science and Hypothesis, p. 127.

21 think Poincaré refers to the passage at the end of Chapter I,

Book II of Carlyle’s Past and Present, but he does not quote ac-
curately.

THE FALLACY OF ANTIQUITY 15]

the price of the rest, has become a common business
practice. The purchaser of an etching receives with it
a scratched print, showing that the plate is destroyed,
so he can rejoice his poor selfish soul that only forty-
nine or ninety-nine other persons in the world can have
the same pleasure as he.

But monopoly and antiquity cannot really add to the
value of a picture or a book, although they may raise
its price. The only proper way to value books, pic-
tures, and everything else, is by reference to the future.
That is the scientific method, the business way. The
historical method is to consider what has been the in-
terest and influence of a book. But real practical
pragmatic present-day value may be quite different
from the historical value. Some works of art grow old;
some grow young. Some lose value, some increase in
value, not merely in antiquarian value through age
and rarity but real value based on present and pro-
spective usefulness. So we call them immortal works.
They flow like perennial springs.

This may be due to the genius of the author, or it
may be due to a misinterpretation of him—no matter
which it is. A book is of value for what we can get
out of it, which is often something much better and
finer than what the author put into it. Exactly what
the author meant we sometimes cannot find out and
usually we do not care. We are entitled to all we can
read into it. Don’t take a man’s word for what he has
accomplished. Don’t take any man’s word for it. Wait
and see. We credit Columbus with discovery of the
New World, and rightly. But in the eyes of his con-
temporaries, he was a failure, because he did not suc-

152 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

ceed in what he tried to do, reach India by going west,
but accomplished something very much greater.

Real market prices are always prospective. If you
want to learn how little past value has to do with pres-
ent value, try to sell off some of your books, your fur-
niture, or your clothes, and see how little you get for
them. For what you sell with your old clothes is the
wear that can be got out of them; not the wear that you
have got out of them, for that account is settled and
closed. We are all of us dealing in futures. It is the
only legitimate business. A merchant when he takes an
inventory of his stock does not go to the bills and mark
everything, say ten per cent above what he paid. No,
he marks some a little above, some a great deal above
and some below their cost. He prices them at what
they will bring as nearly as he can guess. If he does
not guess right he goes into bankruptcy. The restau-
rant keeper must be able to tell in advance with con-
siderable closeness how many of his chance customers
tomorrow will choose apple pie and how many will
choose mince pie. He must know it better than the
pie-eaters themselves. The gents’ furnisher must guess
how many men will come into his shop next week and
what is the size of their necks to a quarter of an inch.
If he is very far wrong in his figuring on futures he will
lose money by stocking up with goods that he cannot
sell or running short of goods that he might have sold.
For the business man must be a prophet if he is to
succeed, so must we all of us if we succeed in anything.
And other things being equal our success will be com-
mensurate with our prophetic powers. For in order
to do right we must see right, and that involves seeing

REAL VALUE IS FUTURE VALUE 153

the end from the beginning. Teleology is the aim of all
the ologies.

What is true of material things is no less true of the
intangible things that we inherit and transmit; lan-
guage, science, customs, political institutions, the forms
of religion, their real value is their future value. We
must be constantly revaluing them, marking them over
as a shopkeeper does his goods, sometimes higher and
sometimes lower.

But we neglect to keep our price current up to date.
We fail, through timidity and laziness, to reappraise the
goods we have inherited from our forefathers. Each
generation bequeaths to the succeeding things far more
costly than houses and lands—such things as words,
ideals, conventions, art, literature, laws, many of them
very precious in our sight, for we have purchased them
with toil and blood. But what they will be worth to
you of the coming generation, you must find out. Don’t
be too hasty about the decision. Don’t mark down the
goods simply because they are old, because, as I have
been trying to explain, age has nothing to do with fixing
values. But on the other hand don’t neglect to submit
your inherited property to the process of revaluation.
It is a terrible responsibility that is being placed upon
you as you enter into the heritage of our civilization,
the accumulated wisdom of the ages. I must confess
that we elders entrust it to you with a good deal of
hesitation and apprehension. We would not do it if we
could help it. We hand over the old blue china teacup
we have kept in the corner cabinet with fear and trem-
bling lest you drop and smash it. You are such careless
children. You do not seem to appreciate as much as

154 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

you might some of the things we have worked hard for.
So we are going to hold on to things till we have to let
go and in the meantime give you plenty of warning and
impress upon you so far as we can our own sense of
values. But we realize after all that it is you who must
determine for yourself what of all we give you, you will
keep, and what you will replace with novelties.

But my object in talking to you today is not merely
to impress you with a sense of responsibility for the
task of the revaluation of civilization that you must
inevitably assume. My object is rather to give you the
rule for the valuation of all things; and this is, find
out if you can, what the things are for. Look to the
future, rather than toward the past, for the explana-
tions you want.

When you were children—if you were the normal and
intelligent children I presume you were—you ran
around asking ““Why?” about everything. It is a good
habit. I hope you have kept it up ever since and will
keep it up through life. But maybe like most of us
you have in large part given it up in the course of years.
You probably got tired of asking ‘“‘Why?” because of
the unsatisfactory nature of the replies. Sometimes
you did not get any and sometimes you got only half
the answer, which is about as bad.

For all the problems of life have two answers, like
quadratic equations, and it is of the highest importance
that you get both of them. ‘Why?’ is really a double
question in one word. It means both “How comes it?”
and “What for?” Of these two answers, one, you see,
is to be sought in the past and the other in the future.
One is the cause and the other the reason. Why do you

THE ANCHORS OF MORALITY 155

eat? Because you are hungry. That is one answer;
that is the cause. Because you will gain strength for
the future. That is the other answer; that is the rea-
son. Why do you sleep? Because you are sleepy; yes,
but also because you want to get rested. Why do you
exercise? The cause is the momentary pleasure of it;
the reason is the future benefit. And so it is with all
the desires, affections, and passions of life. They have
their reasons as well as their causes, and to ignore
them is to become sensuous and materialistic.

Our code of morality has this double sanction of past
and future. It is anchored like a ship in the harbor,
fore and aft. If either anchor chain breaks the ship
swings and is in danger of floundering. Why do this,
or why not do that? There are always two answers.
You ask a child “Why don’t you play with the fire?”
and he may answer, “ ’Cause mamma told me not to.”
It would be a correct and, so far as he knows, a com-
plete answer. Yet it is only half the truth. ‘Because
he would get burnt” is the other answer. The causal
answer is the mother’s command, and this is all the -
child knows. The rational answer, which as always lies
hid in the future, the child may have to find out for
himself by painful experience.

Why not tell a lie? Here again split up the “Why?”
into its two objects. One answer is to be found in the
past, implied in the Ten Commandments. The other
answer, that of the future, you have doubtless divined
if you have had much to do with people who told lies.

But it is not always so simple. In regard to most of
our morals we are still but children. Somebody has
told us not to do something, but has not given us the

156 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

reason. We know that it is best to obey, but not
exactly why. Probably we shall never know altogether.
We get rapped over the knuckles by church, state, and
society for doing this and that, and when we ask ‘““What
for?” they can’t tell us. But don’t get to thinking that
there is no reason because nobody knows the reason.
Reasons are hid in the future and the wisest of men
cannot see very clearly into the future.

There is a stage in the development of some young
men and women, perhaps of all, when they begin to see
the causes of things and do not yet catch sight of the
reasons for things. It is called the period of disillu-
sion. The child accepts things naively, as they are,
at their face value, without asking Wherefore? or What
for? But as he grows older he begins to wonder and
inquire about the origin of things. The reply “‘ "Cause
tis” no longer satisfies him. The age of inquiry is fol-
lowed by the age of skepticism. For the youthful in-
quirer gets as his first answer to his questions the cause,
not the reason. This is natural, for the cause is easiest
to grasp. We are nowadays learning the causes of
much of what we see and do, thanks to modern science,
but we yet know very little about their reasons. We
cannot hope ever to know much about the latter. How
mankind came into existence, the study of evolution
has done much to explain. Why mankind came into
existence, evolution does not yet explain at all and
never can explain altogether.

So when the young man or woman begins to inquire
seriously into the meaning of life he takes the first an-
swer he gets for all the answer there is. He is not
always to blame for this, for sometimes his teachers,

THE FALLACY OF “NOTHING BUT” = 157

who are employed for the express purpose of answer-
ing his questions, do not give him any other answer,
or even intimate to him that there is any further an-
swer to be given. So he gets an idea that he knows it
all and acts accordingly. He discovers that the flag
is but a piece of cloth like any other and calls it so,
thereby shocking his soldier friend, who risked his life
for it. He traces back marriage to a primitive stage of
capture and slavery and declares that that is all it
amounts to now. He reads up on the early history of
religion and it brings him into a mess of superstitions
and tyranny, so he will have nothing to do with it. He
turns every coat inside out and discovering that it has a
seamy side insists upon wearing it that way. He makes
the discovery—and believes that he is the first ever to
have made it—that our manners and customs, our
political and religious ideas, our social and business
forms, are largely built up on conventions; thereupon
he denounces them all as “the conventional lies of civi-
lization” and would return to savagery, until he learns
that the savage has more conventions and conventions
of more absurd kinds than we.

The child who cut open his drum to find out what
it was made of, found out, but forever lost the possi-
bility of finding what it was made for. This is, as I
said, a dangerous stage to one passing through it. It
is ruinous to one who never finds his way out of it.
He becomes a materialist and a pessimist; unable to
contribute to the progress of humanity because he can-
not conceive of progress. To understand progress, still
more to take part in it, requires the ability to look for-
ward. The materialist is a statist. He is more con-

158 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

servative than the conservatives, for he does not admit
the idea of change. If property was robbery in the
beginning, property is robbery now, he assumes. If
marriage was slavery, marriage is slavery. If govern-
ment was founded on force, government is founded on
force. If religion was superstition, religion is supersti-
tion. If a man was a beast, man is a beast. And so
on to the end of the chapter.

Such a man is blind to the future because he is look-
ing backward. Now in looking backward he can some-
times tell what things were, rarely what they are, and
almost never what they will be. He is blind to the
better part of our literature as he is blind to the es-
sence of our civilization, for the language of the higher
passions, of patriotism, love, and religion, is necessarily
conventional, symbolic. This is because the higher
passions and the deeper emotions cannot be fully ex-
pressed in any language yet existing. So the poets and
the prophets have to speak in a foreign tongue, using
our words, but not in the literal and ordinary sense, be-
cause our words are not suited to them. They have
to invent a language of their own, because they look
to the future, where lies their reason. They need a
language of the future and even Esperanto will not do.
The better part of theology is eschatology. All true
religion is prophetic, all true art is prophetic, all true
science is prophetic, all true politics is prophetic. They
all have their eyes fixed on something seen afar, invisi-
ble to common gaze and not to be described in common
language, which can only describe things seen and
known, that is, things past. All true love is prophetic.
Why does a young man fall in love with a particular

THE SNARE OF WORDS 159

girl? Is it the shape of a nose, the curve of a lock of
hair? It means more, a lifelong companionship, the
founding of home, the raising of family.

It is therefore absurd to ask people to say exactly
what they mean; they cannot when they mean very
much. It is only our trivialities and commonplaces that
can find language perfectly adequate to their expres-
sion. We can tell the whole truth only when there is
not much to tell. We cannot afford to take words at
their face value any more than we can take men,
theories, and institutions at their face value. Some-
times they mean more, sometimes less. Do not think
that you can get their real value by their history. You
cannot always tell what a word means by tracing it to
its origin. You are getting further away from its mean-
ing the further back you go. ‘The cause is not the
reason. The answer to a problem is found at the end.
The moral to a fable is found at the end. The point to
a joke is found at the end. So whether life is a prob-
lem, a fable, or a joke, its meaning is to be sought in
its end.

This distinction between the cause and the purpose
of things, between how-comes-it and what-for, is origi-
nal but not new. After I had thought it out for my-
self, with more hard thinking than you would suppose,
seeing how glibly I talk about it, I happened to turn to
Plutarch’s ‘‘Pericles” and found that he had stated the
point clearly in the following passage:

Now there was nothing in my opinion, to prevent both
of them, the naturalist and the seer, from being in the right
of the matter; the one correctly divined the cause, the

160 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

other the object or purpose. It was the proper province of
the one to observe why anything happens, and how it comes
to be what it is: of the other to declare for what purpose
anything happens and what it means.

But I am glad I did not read Plutarch till after I
had worked out the idea for myself because I would
not have appreciated its tremendous importance in the
interpretation of nature, ethics, and religion. We have
nowadays many more naturalists than seers. Seers
were never more needed. Darwinism has not, in my
opinion, banished teleology from biology but has merely
buried it deeper. Bergson in his Creative Evolution is
one of the seers who are trying to dig it up again. |

Allied to the mistaking the cause for the reason is
mistaking the material for the object. What is a
statue? It may quite justifiably be called a block of
marble. It can be weighed as such by the physicist and
analyzed as such by the chemist. Its remarkable form
can be completely accounted for by the chisel strokes
of the sculptor, these by the blows of the hammer,
these by the power of the muscles, this by the poten-
tial energy of the food eaten, this can be traced back
to the rddiant energy of the sun; this establishing a
complete causal chain, mostly well understood. It
might be argued by a materialist that there was no
room for anything else, that everything was accounted
for. So it is, except the most important thing of all,
what the statue is for, what the sculptor meant by it.
These physical and chemical investigations have not
helped us in the least to understand the meaning of the
statue. They have perhaps actually hindered us from

THE PREVISION OF PROVIDENCE 161

the perception of its significance by absorbing our time
and attention and leading us all the time in the wrong
direction; into the past, not into the future, where the
meanings of things are to be found. The question
‘What for?” should not be put to the past. “For” is
part of “forward.”

For man lives forward. He alone has the power of
prevision. He plans for years; builds for centuries in
advance; sacrifices himself for the benefit of genera-
tions to come. He alone has visions of a distant future,
of a Utopia upon earth, or of a city not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens.

Now man is not peculiar in working for the future,
but he is peculiar in knowing that he is. The bee stor-
ing up honey in the comb for the days when there shall
be no more flowers, the bird making a nest for eggs
yet to be laid, they are obviously working for the fu-
ture, but it is not due to their own forethought. In the
case of the instinct of insects and birds there is ap-
parently also prevision, but it is not their own prevision.
It seems that the world as a whole has this characteris-
tic of prevision which is characteristic of the highest
human intelligence. That is, in the world order man
recognizes something working that is akin to his own
mind but manifestly greater and more knowing and
farther seeing, and to this he gives the name of God.
Providence means literally “seeing ahead.”

This gift of prevision, of foresight, which man in
some degree possesses, has in all ages been recognized
as the most divine of his faculties, for it is most like
the teleological constitution of the cosmos. Because
men have this gift they can set up for themselves goals

162 LOOKING BACKWARD—LIVING FORWARD

in advance of their times, higher ideals to be attained;
and then strive for them consciously and consecutively.
That is to say, the motive power of human actions may
be set in the future instead of the past. We see a
horse go faster as it is going homeward, and we say
that is an intelligent horse; so it is. He is not being
driven but led, and led by an unseen motive, oats
ahead, not whip behind. That is a sign of intelligence,
the sign of intelligence, in fact. You can judge of the
intelligence of a man in the same way, by whether his
motives are ahead or behind. It is more noble to be
moved by a pull than by a push.

The true object of education is the cultivation of this
faculty of prevision. If you young people have been
properly educated you have had your heads turned. A
college is a “school of the prophets,” quite as much as
that mentioned in the Bible. You young men shall see
visions and you young women shall prophesy. And
they will not be vain imaginings because you will know
how to make them come true. You have learned from
your study of science to have faith in the validity of
nature, in the constancy of law. You have been taught
in your historical studies what can be accomplished by
human exertion and how it should be undertaken. His-
tory is like a chauffeur’s mirror, set so as to show the
road behind, but with the view of telling you what is
coming. You should now be able to see the outcome
from the beginning. You are expected to be able to
tell a current from an eddy in the tide of the affairs of
men. You should know how to tell a fad from a re-
form. As a gardener knows the difference between
weeds and flowers when the first cotyledons appear

ANGELS UNAWARES 163

above the soil, so you should know the difference be-
tween profitable and detrimental social movements as
they spring up. You should be able to distinguish be-
tween a rising statesman and a false alarm.

This evaluation of new ideas and persons is much
more difficult than the revaluation of old things of
which I spoke a while ago, and it is also much more im-
portant. Princes are always in disguise, in the real
world as in fairy books. We entertain angels only un-
awares. Great causes appear among us incognito. The
kingdom of God cometh not with observation but as a
thief in the night.

INVERTED HYPOCRISY
Abstain from all appearance of evil—I Thessalonians 5:22.

THERE is a vice, widely prevalent, very deleterious
in its effects, yet rarely condemned by moralists; so
rarely in fact that it has had no proper name given to
it. Perhaps the nearest we have to a suitable designa-
tion is that of “inverted hypocrisy,” first applied to
Dean Swift by his friends when they discovered how
much piety and benevolence he concealed under the
cloak of skepticism and malice.

Ordinary hypocrisy consists in pretending to be
better than you really are. Inverted hypocrisy con-
sists in pretending to be worse than you really are.
The inverted form is more injurious both to the indi-
vidual practicing it and to his associates than is the
ordinary. If one assumes a virtue when he has it not,
he raises the moral standard of the community and the
ideal of human nature to the extent to which his pro-
fession is credited by the people who know him. When
one falsely confesses a wicked deed or a mean motive
he is lowering the moral tone of society in so far as
he is believed. The sin of the deception is the same
in both cases, but since the evil in our own nature de-
lights to recognize its counterpart in others, we are
more apt to assume the truth of the ignoble profession
than we are the claim to virtue. The reflex action upon

the individual posing as saint or sinner is also very im-
164

ASSUMING VICES 165

portant because one inevitably and unconsciously tends
to become what he habitually pretends to be and is gen-
erally regarded as being.

The amount of lying that a man will do to prove
that he has been a rogue is appalling. It is a vice com-
mon to the prayer meeting and to the saloon. The con-
vert who proclaims that he has “broken all the ten
commandments time and again, year after year,” may,
after all, be only breaking that against lying. In
Shaw’s play of “Major Barbara,” the repentant sinner
brought in much revenue to the Salvation Army by
telling how he used to beat and kick his poor old
mother, until the appearance on the scene of the indig-
nant lady in a belligerent state of mind compelled him
to retreat and retract, and freed him at one stroke from
the burden of his fictitious sins. The practice of con-
fession offers an insidious temptation to overindulgence
even beyond the limits of truth. Like Topsy, it is hard
to stop when we get started. It requires great moral
restraint at times to avoid becoming an inverted hypo-
crite.

That one’s motives for adopting this perverted form
of moral prevarication are often creditable does not, of
course, excuse it or neutralize its evil consequences.
Whether it is modesty, cynicism, an abnormal sense of
one’s own unworthiness, a desire not to be peculiar, or
the fear of being taken for a prig, the practice of wear-
ing one’s clothes seamy side out and putting the worst
foot forward has deplorable effects. A man who “never
does a proper thing without giving an improper motive
for it” is apt to be an undesirable citizen. We measure
up by the height of our companions, and what lowers

166 INVERTED HYPOCRISY

them in our sight lowers us in reality. In a pine forest
all trees grow tall.

We should do unto ourselves what we would have
others do unto us, that is, credit us with the highest mo-
tive for our actions. Why we do things is often quite as
inexplicable as it is why others do them, but if it is nec-
essary to adopt an interpretation let us give our good
angel the benefit of the doubt. When we are caught
giving ten cents to a street beggar we begin to apolo-
gize for the act, which, however unwise it may be, is
certainly creditable in itself. We say, “I couldn’t help
it; I am so constituted that I must give money to the
poor,” thus throwing upon Fate or heredity the re-
sponsibility for our virtues as we commonly do for our
vices. Or we say, “I did it from a purely selfish mo-
tive; I should have felt uncomfortable all day if I
had not,” which is a fictitious assumption of inverted
hypocrisy, because it is indirectly boasting the posses-
sion of an ingrained benevolence of character and an
active conscience.

The employer who voluntarily cuts down the hours
of work takes pains to state publicly the fact or the
fiction that his hands will do more in eight hours than
ten. If he provides lunch rooms and resting places for
the girls he is careful to explain that it saves time and
increases their efficiency. If he puts up model tene-
ments he always professes to do it as a profitable in-
vestment. This disguised philanthropy is so common
that it has been given a special name, “three per cent
charity.”

Inverted hypocrisy is more common among men than
among women. Women generally disguise their vices

LIES OF ALUMNI 167

rather than expose and exaggerate them. A boy will
boast of the number of cigarettes he smokes, so many
that his doctor has warned him that he will die in a
year unless he stops, but no girl will admit taking cold
from thin silk hose and pumps. Still women may often
be observed to affect cowardice in order to stimulate
masculine gallantry. And I have heard ladies who have
given away some piece of valuable clothing tell their
friends that they never did like to wear it; it was not
becoming.

In the minor forms of inverted hypocrisy which be-
long to the realm of etiquette rather than ethics, there
is apparently a tendency to improvement. An affecta-
tion of inability to sing or speak in public, once almost
a requirement of politeness, is now discountenanced.
It is not regarded as consistent with true sportsmanship
to underrate too greatly one’s own skill at golf or chess.

This gives ground for some hope that the more ob-
jectionable manifestations of the vice may likewise be
eliminated by public opinion. The time may come when
alumni returning to their alma mater will find other
methods of ingratiating themselves with the undergrad-
uates than by telling tales of their college pranks and
misdeeds which, if true, would be ground for depriving
them of their degrees; and when men, in order to prove
themselves no better than other people, will not invent
a “past” or steal sins from printed books like Kipling’s
Tomlinson.

Many a man has been discovered by accident or
death to have been leading a double life; professedly
idle and frivolous, really industrious and serious; or
posing as a hard-hearted miser, really self-sacrificing

168 INVERTED HYPOCRISY

and charitable. In such a case it is a question whether
his secret goodness has been sufficient to overcome the
evil influence of his bad example. Beware of sheep in
wolves’ clothing.

If a man refuses a drink of whisky it is rarely ad-
mitted to be from a preference for sobriety. He thinks
it necessary to profess a dislike for the taste or he in-
vents a fictitious physician to prohibit his indulgence.
He prefers to “own” to a weak stomach than to a strong
conscience.

A decent man in level company will sometimes match
the stories of amours with fictions of his own in order
to escape the imputation of piety. “Abstain from all
appearance of virtue” is the motto of many men.

A soldier comes back from the war with medals. But
he will not submit to any imputation of courageous-
ness. According to his own story he went over the top
from sheer cowardice, from fear of being laughed at.
He enlisted in the first place, not from patriotism, but
because he happened to be out of a job at the time
and wanted a bit of adventure.

Such modesty would not matter if people, especially
young people, were not deceived by it and come to be-
lieve that no one acts from moral motives. To deny
good motives is to extend the scope of bad motives.
To minimize virtue is to exaggerate evil.

The man who pretends to know more than he does
is a very disagreeable person to associate with, but he is
not nearly so exasperating as the man who pretends to
know less than he does. You may be able to learn
something from the pretentious individual, but one who
affects ignorance has you at a disadvantage, and is

CULTIVATED IGNORANCE 169

liable to lead you into making a fool of yourself through
thinking he is one.

This inverted hypocrisy of the intellect is one of the
cultivated vices of the age. In some of its forms it is
affected by women even more than men. There still
exist women who think that men are fond of simple-
tons and apt to choose them for wives. A young man
showing a feminine friend about the city in the eve-
ning stops for a moment before the open door of the
power house of the trolley line and points out the big
dynamos. She exclaims: “Electricity is all so mys-
terious. I’ve tried and tried, but I never could under-
stand how those things worked.” Her escort knows
she is mistaken, and suspects she is lying, because a
dynamo is much less complicated than a steam engine,
over which she would have exhibited no astonishment
or perplexity. If he is in a tolerant and good-natured
mood he expresses a polite regret at her mental in-
capacity and passes on. If he feels a bit malicious at
being expected to swallow so silly a remark, he offers to
explain its workings, and she, realizing that he has
caught her, either refuses to listen, thereby confirming
his suspicion, or, after listening, thanks him gravely,
for thus telling her that which she knew before or did
not wish to know at all. If she had told the truth in
the first place that she had never studied the subject,
or was not interested in it, or did not think it worth
while, or was too lazy, she would have kept a larger
part of his respect.

Formerly travelers in foreign lands professed to know
all about the history, art, and literature of the places
they visited, and they complimented the reader by as-

170 INVERTED HYPOCRISY

cribing to him equal omniscience. Nowadays they write
books to display their ignorance and to boast of their
inattention. In the old-style book we would read:
“Everybody knows the story of the reconciliation be-
tween Emperor Fred. Barbarossa and Pope Alexander
III effected here on 23d July, 1177, through the medi-
ation of Doge Seb. Ziani, commemorated by these three
red slabs.” In the modern volume of travel sketches
we should find: “The guide pointed out some red stones
in the porch and said something happened in there
sometime, but I did not pay any attention to what he
said, and it is too much trouble to look it up.” Ifa man
has not enough energy even to copy from Baedeker,
he ought never to travel, still less to write about it. No
doubt the second writer knew as much about Pope and
Emperor as the first, but he preferred to affect a shal-
low pretense of ignorance, idleness, and indifference.
So the volumes with mock-modest titles continually
swarm out from the presses: “The Roundabout Ram-
bles of an Absent-Minded Man,” “The Log of a Lazy
Voyager” and “Sight-Seeing by a Blind Tourist.” Now
if any man has information to give let him give it and
with as little condescension as possible; but we have
ignorance enough of our own without buying it at the
rate of three dollars a volume.

All branches of art are impeded in their progress by
this hypocrisy of incapacity. The people are too docile.
If they are told that they ought to admire certain
paintings or poems or music, they dutifully do so. If
they are told that certain others possess recondite vir-
tues only to be appreciated by a few gifted and well
trained minds, they accept that also and meekly admit

SMOKE SCREENS 171

their incapacity. A few years later, after the connois-
seurs have tired of their pretense of esotericism, the
work of art is taken from the sacred shrine and given
freely to the people, who straightway discover that it is
not hopelessly above their heads after all. It takes its
place among the other idols of the market place and
attracts a proper number of sincere worshipers.

Who complains of the obscurity of Browning nowa-
days? Anybody can read him without regarding it asa
literary feat. This is not due to the labors of the
Browning Society in supplying lexicons, keys, elucida-
tions, and diagrams, nor does it prove that the school-
boys and schoolgirls of today are smarter than their
parents. It only means that the ban is off. Meredith’s
novels become comprehensible just as soon as one by
one the copyright drops off and they come out in cheap
edition. Ibsen’s plays, once the monopoly of the elect
(self-elected), now are found too simple to brag about.
A quotation from the Rubaiyat no longer serves as a
password of the Society of the Illuminati. It is too
common to use even as the title of a short story in a
Sunday supplement. The superstition of incompre-
hensibility still shadows Henry James, but it will not
last much longer. Before long we shall discover that
the few who profess to be able to understand all he has
written and the many who profess not to be able to
understand anything he has written are equally false in
their pretensions.

On summer afternoons the band in the park plays
Wagner between Verdi and Sousa. The crowd frankly
enjoys it and applauds. Nobody stops his ears to shut
out the horrid cacophony that shocked our parents.

172 INVERTED HYPOCRISY

Nobody puts on a mystified and baffled expression.
What we call the elevation of popular taste consists
principally in inducing the people to reveal their taste
instead of masking it under the affectation of incapac-
ity.

Inverted hypocrisy, whether of mind or morals, un-
deniably exerts a bad influence on the whole. On the
other hand there is much to be said of its converse, the
normal kind of hypocrisy, even though it is classed
among the vices instead of the virtues.

How far a man can keep himself in physical health
by assuming that he is well is a disputed question.
Christian Scientists have gone to extremes—but we all
say that “there is something in it.” At least we ac-
knowledge that a man seriously impairs his health by
thinking himself diseased.

We know that in the moral sphere this method will
go further than in the physiological. ‘‘Assume a virtue
if you have it not” is sometimes good advice. To pro-
fess moral health is unquestionably more wholesome
than to assume moral disease. A man who sets up a
false reputation for himself may by that means acquire
a real character. The pretense may become an actual-
ity, the fiction become a fact.

“What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me,”
says Rabbi Ben Ezra.

An ingenious French writer, Jules de Gaultier, has
built up a philosophy of ethics based upon the assump-
tion that hypocrisy is not a vice but a virtue, in fact
the chief of virtues since it is only by means of it that
moral advance has been made. According to this
theory, which he called ‘Bovarysme’—from Flau-

MAKING MYTHS COME TRUE 173

bert’s Madame Bovary—man sets himself up as a
model of what he would like to be and does in that way
come nearer to his ideal than he was or than he other-
wise would be. A nation believing itself, however er-
roneously, the most courageous or enterprising people
in the world may in course of time actually become
such.

It is, says Gaultier, by means of the power of af-
firmation, of assuming an ideal and so converting it
into reality, that man has made all his ethical progress.
The “Moral Myth” of Gaultier corresponds to the “‘So-
cial Myth” of Sorel, who has made it the mechanism of
social progress.

But can that be called a myth which is but the first
step to reality? When an architect wants to build a
house he draws a picture of it, green trees, pretty flow-
ers, children playing politely. That is a myth, a piece
of hypocrisy. No such house exists on the lot—but
were it not for the picture the house would never be
built.

James’s “Will to Believe” applies not to “impossi-
bilities” but to unrealities, which may be made actuali-
ties if we desire them strongly enough and have faith
in their possibility. It is only by reaching out his oars
in advance of the boat that the rower can make prog-
ress. Vaihinger in his Philosophy of “As If” (Als Ob)
makes this the basis of a complete and elaborate theory
of social progress.

We must admit that it is wrong to be a hypocrite for
the purpose of deceiving other people. But is it wrong
to be a hypocrite for the purpose of deceiving oneself?
Is it altogether a disadvantage to see yourself, not as

174 INVERTED HYPOCRISY

you are, but as you would like to have others see you?
When you are learning to swim or skate, your instructor
keeps telling you that “you can do it,” that “you are
doing splendidly.” He is lying, if you like, but if he
can make you believe his lie it will cease to be a lie and
become a truth.

We must beware of carrying over in to the realm of
psychology the laws of inanimate nature. Wishing and
hoping and believing that the weather will be better to-
morrow will make no difference with it, but wishing
and hoping and believing that you will be better—or
worse—tomorrow may make a difference.

At any rate if you are going to do any pretending, be
sure you pretend on the right side. It was not alto-
gether a gain when Christians ceased to call themselves
“saints.” Some of them really became what they all
professed to be.

TELLING THE TRUTH

These are the things that ye shall do. Speak ye every man the
truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in
your gates: and let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against
his neighbour; and love no false oath; for all these are things that
I hate, saith the Lord—Zachariah 8: 16-17.

THESE phrases sound like platitudes to us. It seems
so obvious and necessary that God should be a lover
of truth and a hater of lies, and that he should wish us
to be like him in this respect. But when we study
comparative religions we find that our God is not as
other gods; that truthfulness is not regarded by most
nations as an attribute of deity. The gods of our an-
cestors, Woden and Thor and Loki, were not truth-
tellers. The gods of the Greeks and Romans, Jupiter,
Juno, and Minerva, were exceedingly skillful in lying
through constant practice. Indeed, there was selected
a special god of lying, and any man, who wanted divine
assistance and guidance in some important lie he was
about to tell, could to this end offer his prayers to Mer-
cury. Among the multifarious gods of the Hindu there
is not one god of truth, but all of them set examples of
deceit and of trickery which the most devout of their
worshipers would find difficult to imitate. Greek his-
torians tell, as one of the most remarkable facts about
that new and conquering race which had come out of
the mountains and overspread the plains of Mesopo-
tamia, the Persians, that they taught their boys three

things: to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth.
175

176 TELLING THE TRUTH

The world, outside of Christendom, has made no ap-
parent moral progress in this regard for the last two
thousand years; and among three-fourths of the inhabi-
tants of the earth today a lie is not regarded as a sin,
or, at least, is considered a very venial one. In India
a man who does not lie when it is to his advantage to
do so, is looked upon as a fool. ‘“Truthfulness is the
youngest of the virtues.” *

But among Christian nations there certainly has
been improvement in the matter of truthfulness, and it
is safe to say that our own race and civilization have
come nearer the ideal than any other the world has
ever known. There is here definite, measurable prog-
ress, which we can discern more plainly than in most
branches of applied ethics. For example, this is a
commercial age; and, in commerce, lying used to be
thought indispensable. In fact, even now, In most
countries, small bargaining is not carried on at all with-
out a process of “beating down,” involving many lies
on both sides. But in this country, at the present time,
by far the larger proportion of business transactions is
conducted without misrepresentation. It is beginning
to be realized that “honesty zs the best policy.” Look
over the pages of advertising which make up the bulk
of our magazines and you will find they consist, for the
most part, of attractive and cleverly depicted descrip-
tions of the articles for sale. Except for such rhetorical
flourishes as that the goods in question are ‘‘the best
in the world,” “the cheapest on the market,” and ‘“‘in-
dispensable to every household,” which, however far
from the truth, are not intended to be accepted literally,

1 Nietzsche.

TRUTHFUL ADVERTISING 177

' and must not be considered too seriously, you will find
they contain very few false statements. One can buy
from magazine advertisements or mail-order catalogues
with the same confidence as though he had the article
in hand. Patent medicines and health foods are about
the only commodities that keep to the old form of ex-
aggeration and concealment. This remarkable advance
in the ethics of advertising is worthy of our attention
because there has been perceptible improvement in the
matter within the memory of any one of us. We have
reason for great encouragement that such a considera-
ble degree of truthfulness and frankness has been at-
tained in a field like commerce once supposed to be
necessarily dependent for its success on lying and de-

ception.
_ We have reason to hope that in time the news and
editorial columns of a newspaper will be as truthful as
its advertisements, and that finally household and so-
cial lying may be eliminated. Even politics is not hope-
less. I may be too optimistic on this point, but I am
quite positive, in my own mind, that there is less falsi-
fying and misrepresentation of opponents, arguments,
and position in political speeches nowadays than there
used to be. I believe that any one who will compare
the campaign literature of the time of Washington and
Jefferson with that of the last presidential campaign,
will come to the same conclusion, however little that
may say for the truthfulness of either. But this is
merely an attempt to see light through the thickest of
the clouds of falsehood that envelop us.

It is, at any rate, a great triumph to have a prevalent
opinion that truthfulness is a virtue, and to have lying

178 TELLING THE TRUTH

under an ostensible condemnation. The most degraded
among us feel this, and the belief in Lis own truthful-
ness is the last shred of self-respect that a man gives
up. Approach some man who you think has resigned
all pretention to morality, and try it. Tell him that he
is a habitual drunkard, and he will grin; accuse him
of the grossest licentiousness, and he will blush—with
pride; but call him a liar, and you will have to dodge.

What we need, then, is not a higher ideal, nor a
sharper realization of the wickedness of lying, but a
more sensitive conscience to detect our deviations from
the truth. Most of our lying is done unconsciously,
which, of course, does not make our case one bit better,
but accounts for our obliviousness.

I will not discuss the question as to whether a lie is
ever justifiable. It is generally admitted by authori-
ties on ethics that there are occasions when a lie is per-
missible. Probably none of us would hesitate to mis-
lead a crazed man with a gun chasing a child to shoot
it, when asked as to the street down which it had gone.
Such cases are so rare as to be of no practical impor-
tance in comparison with the number of unnecessary
lies we tell. Neither shall I attempt to decide whether
we can get along in this world and tell the truth all the
time. I believe there have been entire days in my life
in which I have not told a lie, and I presume all of you
can say as much or more. I do not suppose that any
of us would venture to declare that he had spent a week
without committing this sin, unless perchance he were
living in solitude. We often hear amusing stories
of several persons agreeing to tell the truth for
some stated period, and of the disastrous consequences

THE ART OF TRUTH-TELLING 179

that follow. Very likely the stories are not true, but
conventional lies are so interwoven with our civilization
that such an ideal as absolute truth, frankly expressed,
seems hopelessly unattainable. No one of us can re-
form the world. Nobody can reform anybody else,
anyway. The only thing we can do, practically, is for
each one of us to resolve to be a little more truthful
than our neighbor, even if we suffer for it, and to de-
vote more thought to the problem of how to tell the
truth. Like every other virtue, truth-telling does not
result from merely willing to do it. Nobody can be
good, or what is more important, do good, by simple ef-
fort of the will; no more than he can become an ath-
lete or an engineer by wishing to be one. There is a
constant tendency in the church to exaggerate the im-
portance of good intentions, and to ignore results.

It is, doubtless, worse to make a false statement
knowing it to be false; but practically there is no dif-
ference, except to the individual. So far as the world
is concerned, an untruth is as disastrous as a deliberate
lie. It makes a difference to yourself, to the relations
between yourself and your God, whether you are sin-
cerely mistaken or intentionally deceitful, but to con-
sider that point as the most important is to be purely
selfish.

I ask a man when train Number Two leaves, and he
says “At four o’clock.” When I miss my train I hunt
him up and ask him what he meant. He replies calmly:
“Oh, I was just mistaken, that’s all. I didn’t tell a
lie. The recording angel did not put down a sin against
me that time.”’ Then I know that he is not only care-
less but selfish. The true Christian thinks more about

180 TELLING THE TRUTH

other people than himself, and more about conse-
quences than intentions. That is why the true Chris-
tian is truthful.

I must repeatedly call your attention to the text,
which is positive, not negative. It is not ‘Thou shalt
not lie,” but it is “Speak the truth,” which is an en-
tirely different thing. We find it much easier to obey
a prohibition than a command, and so we try to turn
God’s laws into that form. We find it easier not to hate
than to love; easier to rest on the seventh day than to
work on the six days; easier not to lie than to tell the
truth. But the negative of a vice is not much of a
virtue.

To tell the truth, it is first of all necessary to have a
truth to tell. Truth-telling is conveying a fact from
one mind to another. Of course, like everything else
in this world, it cannot be perfectly done except in the
simplest cases. We can never know the absolute truth
if it is at all complex. Language is so inadequate that
we can never perfectly convey to another even what we
thoroughly comprehend ourselves. But these theoreti-
cal limits need not concern us, since we do not usually
come near them. ‘The more we learn of truth of all
kinds, the more easily we can speak it. All education
is merely training in truth-telling. That is what our
schools are for. That is the sole purpose of a uni-
versity. If asgraduate after four years of hard work
can distinguish more clearly between truth and error,
the work has been worth while. If he cannot, his uni-
versity course is a failure, no matter how many de-
grees he has.

Every scrap of truth is so valuable that we cannot

A SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST 181

be too diligent in collecting and preserving it. Hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars are spent in sending as-
tronomers to distant points to watch an eclipse that
they may be able to tell the truth a little more nearly
about the sun. A cloudy day may make the expedition
a failure. Numerous expeditions have been sent to the
Arctic and Antarctic regions to find out the truth about
the Poles. Many men have sacrificed their lives to find
out which species of mosquito carries fever germs. The
information on this point in entomology has already
saved thousands of lives and will continue to save lives
through the years to come. What men are willing to
give their lives to discover we ought to be willing to
devote a little time to learning. “Wisdom is the princi-
pal thing; therefore get wisdom.” Habitual ignorance
is a vice. Intentional and premeditated ignorance is a
crime. It is the unpardonable sin, because it is a sin
against the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth.

We cannot know everything, any more than we can
do everything. If a botanist spends his whole life
studying one plant, he will be able to come nearer tell-
ing the truth about it than you or I, but even on this
one subject he cannot comply with that glib request
we make of our witnesses, to “tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.” No man can do
that. We have no reason to be ashamed that we are
ignorant, but we should be ashamed that we are ig-
norant of so many things that we could know if it
were not that our natural laziness and inborn love of
lies prevent us from knowing.

It is, of course, not desirable that we should all know
the same things. Nor is it necessary to decide abso-

182 TELLING THE TRUTH

lutely the vexed question as to what knowledge is of
the most worth. Obviously that depends upon circum-
stances. If a man is going to another city, it is more
important for him to know the time tables and the con-
junction of the trains than to know about Mars and the
conjunction of the planets. It is desirable to know
Greek to be able to read the words of Paul and Plato
in the original, but if a man were going to live in China
it would be worth more to know Chinese. But all truth
comes from One who is the only source of truth, and it
is all equally sacred.

We should avoid all contempt of those who are pur-
suing truth in a different form or by different methods
from our own, and concern ourselves solely with ac-
quiring what truth we can in our own way.

Our first and principal duty in this world is to seek
truth. Never be content with a fiction when you can
get a fact. Do not accept anything on poor authority
when you can get better. Be as scrupulous as a judge
about hearsay evidence. You should use secondhand
information as reluctantly as secondhand clothes. Be
constantly and perpetually critical of everything you
hear and read. ‘Prove all things; hold fast that which
is good.” Remember that the “Father of Lies” is al-
ways devising stratagems to deceive you; that he is ly-
ing in wait in the most innocent-looking ambuscades;
that he may make an ally of your best friend
and most trusted authority, and deceive the very elect.
Never let your desire for information get ahead of
your powers of discrimination. Don’t swallow faster
than you can digest. It is safer to be skeptical than
credulous, to miss truth than to believe a lie, In the

AS EASY AS LYING 183

words of one of our humorist-philosophers, “It is bet-
ter not to know so much than to know so many things
that are not so,” words which might well be carved
over the door of every university and public library in
the land. To believe a falsehood is to deny God. It
makes you a slave of Satan instead of a servant of the
Lord. The devil is a liar and the father of lies.

Our most insidious temptations come from our ten-
dency to believe what we want to believe, to see what
we want to see, and to shut our eyes to everything un-
pleasant and disturbing to our preconceptions and de-
sires. It is exceedingly difficult to accept an unwel-
come fact at its par value, or to reject a confirmation
of our pet theory because it lacks foundation. It
requires the keenest of eyesight to follow truth
through the maze oferror. To realize just how much a
fact proves; to perceive exactly where are the limits of
our knowledge; to know what we do not know—these
are what tax our ability to the utmost and cause us
most frequently to fail. If two people in an argument
would both tell the truth, would admit the full force of
an opposing argument, and care nothing about winning
a point, they would find themselves not so far apart as
they supposed. But, as Huxley says, “An argument al-
ways tends to slip from the question of what is right to
who is right.”

There are two sides to truth-telling. As it takes two
to make a quarrel, so it takes two to tell the truth: one
to speak, and one to listen. It is a social act. Robin-
son Crusoe could not tell the truth—nor a lie—until
he had a companion on the island. Now it is difficult

184 TELLING THE TRUTH

to tell the truth, but it is still more difficult to listen to
it. It would be easier for me to tell you what I think
of you than to listen while you told me what you think
of me.

One of the principal reasons why there is so little
truth told in the world is that most of us do not want
the truth told. The more nearly a man comes to telling
the truth, the more he is disliked and avoided. Any-
body who told the naked truth on all occasions would
have to take to the hills. People would not endure it.
I am not advocating any violent reform in this matter.
It would be a useless waste of breath. I would only go
as far as you are all willing to go with me in a plea for
a little more toleration of truth-telling. Do not be one
of those persons of whom we say that they have to be
lied to. Remember that your neighbor is, like yourself,
under the injunction to speak the truth, and if you by
your attitude are preventing him from speaking the
truth you are responsible for his sin of omission or —
commission. Don’t compel him to sacrifice either your
friendship or his candor. If we would, each one of us,
resolve to hear the truth with patience and without of-
fense the greatest obstacle to truth-telling would be
removed. :

If a lie is told or the truth is withheld, it is more
often the hearer’s fault. For it is easier to tell the
truth, in so far as one knows it, than to invent a plausi-
ble falsehood, and men would not take the more diffi-
cult course unless they were forced to it. We need an-
other petition in our prayer “Lead us not into tempta-
tion.” We should add, “Let us not lead others into
temptation.” To be practical and specific, when you

SUFFER TRUTH GLADLY 185

go shopping do not try to inveigle the clerk into saying
that the article is worth two dollars, but that he will
cut it down to ninety-nine cents for you on account of
your good looks. It might not be true, and you would
become particeps criminis to the lie. Ask the political
speaker why he exaggerates the merits of his cause and
candidate and he will tell you it is because his auditors
demand such talk. Should he give a fair and unbiased
statement of the case as he saw it he would do more
harm than good to his cause and party, “damning them
with faint praise.” Thus the audience is more to blame
than the speaker.

It is unfair to lay the blame for ‘“‘yellow” journalism
on the editor alone. The five hundred thousand sub-
scribers are more to blame. When you buy a paper
take pains to select the most truthful one you can find,
the most sober, sane, unbiased, and reliable. Whenever
you do this you are working for the Lord and not the
Devil.

A minister said to me not long since that it was im-
possible for him to preach the truth to his congregation
on many theological questions. He could not tell them
that the world moved in theology as in everything else,
because they who had not studied such questions held a
different opinion from him who had spent many years
in such study. That does not imply that he told lies to
his people, or that he hypocritically concealed his real
Opinions in order to hold his position. He simply felt
obliged to leave them in ignorance of much that had
been discovered in recent years about the Bible and the
nature of its revelation because they would not bear
the truth. They preferred to walk in darkness rather

186 TELLING THE TRUTH

than in the light. Permit your minister to tell the
truth. |

You can also give encouragement to truth-tell-
ing by being less sensitive in social matters. You need
not take offense when an acquaintance does not receive
your call for reasons known only to herself, without re-
quiring her to have you told that she is out, or to con-
ceal herself behind the curtains and pretend the electric
bell did not work. It is not enough to tell the truth
yourself; you should give others a fair chance to tell
the truth also.

Each profession has its own peculiar temptations, its
own code of ethics. The preacher, who, above all others,
should be privileged to speak the truth, is hampered by
antique creeds and the fear of offending his people and
so losing his power of doing them good. The teacher is
tempted to conceal the weak points in his theory and
not to present the facts in their crude, natural form,
but to fix them up so as to seem simpler than they are
and easier to grasp. The lawyer is tempted to exag-
gerate his case and use unfair arguments to win his
cause. The doctor is often known to conceal the truth,
sometimes because he fears the effect on the patient,
but more often because friends and relatives will not
endure the truth and will get a more encouraging physi-
cian. Orators soon learn that it is their most exag-
gerated and untrue statements that win applause, and
that when they keep to plain, unadorned facts the audi-
ence goes to sleep. Children are trained to lie by some
parents, who either punish or scold severely for small
offenses, manifesting such holy horror over petty sins
that their children fear to confess them. Our conven-

VEILING THE TRUTH 187

tionalities require constant repression of the child’s nat-
ural frankness, and this easily leads to concealment
and deception.

Women seem to be more deficient in the matter of
truth-telling than men, perhaps because their deviations
from the truth are more lightly regarded than in the
case of men. We have a different standard for the two
sexes in almost all forms of morals as in this. For ex-
ample, it is commonly regarded as worse for a woman
to swear or get drunk than for a man. On the other
hand, society looks with much more leniency on a
woman who tells lies than on a man of like failing. It
is the duty of each one of us to work in his own way
for the establishment of truth upon earth. All truth,
however trivial it may appear, is only a reflection of
God who is the truth, just as every pool and every bril-
liant pebble reflects the image of the sun. As we grow
in wisdom we approach nearer to God the Omniscient.
Every fact that we acquire, every error we shun, makes
us more like him who is our example. That is the
whole duty of man, to know God, and we are learning
to know God as we know more and more of his doings
in the world, of his eternal and unchangeable laws
which we call the laws of nature. Not man alone, but
every animal, plant, and stone is made in the image of
God, and we know of him by studying them. But the
brightness of pure truth, of the very face of God, is
too dazzling for our weak eyes. We ask that it be
veiled for us. And so man weaves a tissue of false-
hood, of mystery, of poetry, to hide the brightness of
the Truth, making this world still darker by the shadow
of his lies. There is nothing mystic about things di-

188 TELLING THE TRUTH

vine; there is merely our own ignorance. It is he who,
even now as when on earth, opens the eyes of the blind,
even those who have blinded themselves and who walk
in darkness because their deeds are evil. He has prom-
ised us that his spirit, the Spirit of Truth, shall come
and guide us into all truth.

THE DUTY OF INTELLIGENCE

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with
all thy getting get understanding.—Proverbs 4:7.

I PRESUME Christians pay less attention to this than
to any other injunction in the Bible. As a class they
seem to be no more eager than other people to get wis-
dom, and you know there is nothing more unpopular
than learning. In general people acquire as little
knowledge as they can, and while a man will cross the
street to avoid a creditor you often find one going
around a block to dodge a fact that is coming toward
him. Yet it is undoubtedly true that wisdom is the
principal thing we need to make the world go better.
Most people most of the time are doing as well as they
know. There are more blunders than crimes, and the
one is just as bad as the other in its consequences. It
is ignorance, not malice, that makes the most trouble
in government, in society, in the church. We pray
often for the removal of our sins, but not so frequently
for the removal of our ignorance. We seem to think
that if the heart is right all our actions will be right,
forgetting that it is the brain that directs the hands
and tongue. Now, that we should have good inten-
tions is a very important thing to us, but not so im-
portant to other people. A person’s good intentions are
nothing to us, it is his actions alone that affect us.

What matters is not what he meant to do but what he
189

190 THE DUTY OF INTELLIGENCE

did. The world is not concerned with motives, but with
motions.

So it is no excuse at all for a bad act to say you
meant it right. It clears you of blame but it doesn’t re-
move the consequences of your blunder. Your acts
are intended to affect others and you are responsible
for the results. It is pure selfishness to view your work
from the standpoint of your own justifications. You
ought to care more about others than yourself and con-
sider the consequences of your actions rather than the
motives.

Since so much stress is laid on the importance of
good intentions, Christians sometimes get the idea that
it is of no importance how their intentions are carried
out. That is why some of them do so little good in the
world. They are converted, but it doesn’t do anybody
else any good. They are headed in the right direction,
but they don’t go. They have been born again, but
they remain babies. They have a new heart, but it
does not beat.

So it happens that in the practice of Christianity
there is a great deal more of zeal than knowledge. Now
knowledge without zeal is like a ship without an en-
gine; it is useless. Zeal without knowledge is like a
ship without a rudder; it is dangerous. As to which is
the worse, God knows. Both bring calamity. Which
was it that led to the downfall of the Jewish nation?
This is what the Lord said through the mouth of the
prophet: “‘My people are destroyed for lack of knowl-
edge. Because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also
reject thee.” *

1 Hosea 4:6.

ZEAL WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE 19]

The Jew never lacked zeal. Paul persecuted the
Christians with the greatest zeal. The Pharisees and
those that cried “Crucify him” were remarkable for
their earnestness and devotion to religion. Torque-
mada and Philip II of Spain were sincere and well-
meaning. The Bolshevists of Russia and the Moham-
medans of Asia, who have within the last few years
killed more people for their belief than ever perished
under the Roman emperors, are zealous men. No,
there is no lack of zeal and energy in the world, and
good intentions are not rare, ‘‘but where shall wisdom
be found? and where is the place of understanding?
. . . It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver
be weighed out for the price thereof. ... For the
price of wisdom is above rubies.”

How then can we get wisdom? From the All Wise
alone. ‘For the Lord giveth wisdom,” and we are told,
“Tf any of you lack wisdom let him ask of God, ...
and it shall be given him.” That, however, does not
mean that we have nothing to do but pray for it. We
pray for our daily bread, but we have to work for it
just the same. It means that from God only can we
get wisdom.

God is the personification of wisdom as well as the
embodiment of love. That is the literal meaning of the
term Logos used by John and translated “Word.” It
includes all the ‘“‘ologies.’’ All truth comes from God.
That is difficult to realize because we come upon truth
in strange places and in strange guises in this world,
and we often fail to recognize it because it sometimes
appears in such unexpected quarters, and in such dis-
reputable forms. But just as all daylight comes from

192 THE DUTY OF INTELLIGENCE

the sun, whether it is distorted and colored by coming
through glass, or dimly reflected from the surface of a
muddy pool, so everything that is true has a divine
origin. It is important to keep this in mind because
there is a tendency to think that only religious truth
comes from God. Men have always been trying to
limit God, and the latest scheme is to try to confine
him between the lids of the Bible. Everything in the
Bible came from God, they say; but everything out-
side, however true it may be, has another source. What
other source is not stated; certainly not the “Father of
Lies.”

There is in the Bible a revelation of God, but only a
partial one; it is supplementary to what we can find out
about him from studying the world, which, it is taken
for granted, we are all studying. All nature is a revela-
tion of God just as much as is the Bible, and a knowl-
edge of it is necessary to a complete comprehension of
God. Moral laws are not the whole of God’s code. All
physical laws are included as well. Any one who dis-
covers a fact, however insignificant, receives it as a
gift from the Father of Truth. Science is simply an
imperfect attempt to study God as he has revealed him-
self in nature. The textbook I use in organic chemis-
try has for its motto the inspiring words of one of the
greatest masters of science: ‘“Thinking again the
thoughts of God.”

If we believe that God is the source of all wisdom,
we must reach the conclusion that no two truths can
contradict each other. That would seem axiomatic, but
a great many people do not believe it. They stow away,
in separate compartments of their brains, contradic-

THE WIDER SCRIPTURES 193

tory statements without any attempt to reconcile them
or to decide which are right. They think that a thing
may be false at one time and true at another; that a
thing may be true in science but false in religion—and
vice versa. The idea is blasphemous. If we believe in
the unity of God we must believe in the unity of truth.

Our duty is to search for truth wherever it is to be
found, work for it, gather it up, a grain at a time, as
men gather grains of gold from the sands of our moun-
tain streams. We are to search the Scriptures, but also
to search every other possible source for light upon the
great problems of life. I do not wish to be understood
as underestimating the value of studying the Bible, but
I wish to emphasize the necessity of studying other
things, too. The Bible is not all there is of religion.
Enoch, Abraham, and Moses did not have the Scrip-
tures, and they were good men. The early Christians,
who were probably as good as we later ones, had only
the Old Testament and such echoes of the Master’s
teachings as still lingered in the minds of the disciples.
Not for two hundred years, during which Christianity
made its great triumphs, was the Bible put into its pres-
ent shape.

It is customary at the present day to base
moral lessons from the pulpit upon Bible texts alone.
In this, however, we are not following the example of
the Bible preachers. They took their texts from books
or from nature, from both God’s revelations—his Word
and his Works. From the question put to Job? out of
the cyclone you will see he is charged with neglect of
getting that realization of God’s majesty, power, and

2 Job 38.

194 THE DUTY OF INTELLIGENCE

love that can only be acquired by the study of natural
history. God reproaches Job for not having studied the
seasons, the weather, the birds, the leviathan, and the
behemoth. Had he done so, he would not have talked
so foolishly. If he had known more about natural his-
tory he would not have made such blunders in theology.
If he had known more about meteorology and zodlogy
he would have known more about God.

Solomon recommends the same source of wisdom:
“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and
be wise.” “The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make
they their houses in the rocks.”

What texts did Christ preach from? Sometimes he
entered into a synagogue, and after the reading of the
Scripture took a text from that. But he did not take a
text from the sacred writings as often as he did from
nature; and he did not preach as often in churches as
he did in the woods and among the hills. He took
walks through the fields with his disciples on the Sab-
bath—which shocked the devout people of that day
much as it would at the present time—and talked about
the wheat, the weeds, the flowers, the birds, and the
stones. What would you think if, when you assembled
to hear your pastor, he should lead you out from the
church, away from pulpit and pews, from organ and
Bibles and hymn books, out up the road to the hills,
and as you walked he should talk to you of the things
you saw, and in a casual sort of way, and draw moral
lessons from the flowers, the brush, the bird’s nest, and
the fossils in the rocks? That is the kind of preacher
Jesus was. Doubtless such a minister would strike
you as very queer, if not crazy. Just so did Jesus seem

THE CONTAGION OF SIN 195

to the church of his time. Very likely a vigorous pro-
test would be made against such an eccentric person—
just as the Jews protested. What Jesus disliked espe-
cially was conventionality and formalism; but curiously
enough that seems to be what the Christian church is
particularly attached to and regards as indispensable.
It mistakes form for substance, the clothes for the man,
The church was founded in the spirit of Christ as a
revolt against formalism and conventionality, but I
fear there are many belonging to the so-called ‘‘evan-
gelical” branches of the church in these days who are
as much attached to their simple ceremonies as are the
members of other divisions to their more elaborate
forms of worship.

One reason why it is so important to know all of
God’s laws is that the same rule holds good here as in
our own courts. Ignorance of the law excuses no one.
If a man steps from off the top of a building, ignorance
of the law of gravitation does not save him from capital
punishment. Ignorance of the laws of physiology and
hygiene does not exempt one from disease. It is only
by acquainting ourselves as far as possible with the
laws according to which God rules the world that we
are able to take advantage of them and escape punish-
ment for their violation.

It is the same with God’s moral laws as with his
physical or physiological laws. “The soul that sinneth,
it shall die,” is the law, and the only way to escape the
penalty is by finding out what are sins and avoiding
them. Vice and smallpox are both contagious, and even
if you do not know this to be true you will not be able
to escape injury if you suffer yourself to become in-

196 THE DUTY OF INTELLIGENCE

fected. If you fall into a moral abyss the plea that
you did not mean to fall, or that you did not know the
danger, will not save you from a damaged soul any
more than the same excuse will save you from broken
bones when you fall into a chasm. Good intention is
not enough; good intention plus wisdom is all that will
avail. Either alone is practically useless. For real
service two things are necessary, a willingness to serve
and a knowledge of how to do it. If you wish to save
a drowning man you must not only be brave and self-
sacrificing, but know how to swim or to throw a rope.
That is why Peter says, “Add to your virtue knowl-
edge,” and again he enjoins the disciples to “grow in
grace and knowledge,” because if one gets ahead of the
other there is trouble. Paul reprovingly says in
Romans: “For I bear them record that they have a zeal
of God, but not according to knowledge.”

Most of our modern preachers do not lay an equal
emphasis on these two agents of human progress, yet
such advice would seem to be as much needed now as in
the days of Solomon or Paul. It is still common to
see zeal run away with discretion:

There’s nothing that’s equal, ’mong torture’s inventions
To a good-natured fool with the best of intentions.

There is a fable of an elephant who came across a
nest of ostrich eggs lying in the sand of the desert—as
Job describes in the passage referred to. The ele-
phant’s heart was touched with pity at the sight, and
she said to herself: “How sad to see these offspring
neglected by the unnatural mother. Or perhaps she

THE DEVOUT ASTRONOMER 197

has gone in search of food and has met with an acci-
dent. But I, too,ama mother. I will hatch these or-
phaned eggs.” With that she sat upon the nest. We
must have something more than a desire to do good, we
must know how to do it.

Many a brilliant and devout man has failed in the
ministry because he knew but half his business. He
knew his Bible, but not his congregation. He had
studied theology but not psychology. He had his mes-
sage, but could not deliver it because he did not know
how to address it. A workman must know his ma-
terial as well as his tools.

All knowledge is useful to the Christian worker. The
distinction made between sacred and secular is purely
an arbitrary one for practical convenience. The Chris-
tian teacher can afford to neglect neither field. It is
only in the study of nature that he can get any ade-
quate conception of the greatness of God, his omnip-
otence and providence. “The undevout astronomer
is mad,” but all branches of science, properly studied,
lead to reverence. No scientist ever makes the mis-
take so common among unscientific people of doubting
the universality and immutability of God’s laws. Only
those who study natural history realize how God pro-
tects and provides for the meanest of living creatures,
beings so small that we can hardly see them with our
most powerful miscroscopes, but not too small to re-
ceive the same care and attention from their creator
that we do. They seek their food from God even as do
the lions. Every living creature has its pleasures and
its duties, its place in the universal system. It takes
the conceit out of a man to study biology. There is no

198 THE DUTY OF INTELLIGENCE

reason to think that in God’s biological system a man
is better cared for than a microbe.

Of quite as much importance as the study of science
is the study of history. Thus alone can we learn how
God deals with men in masses. We find that a nation,
like an individual, prospers in so far as it keeps God’s
laws; that ‘“‘righteousness exalteth a nation,” that all
the great empires that have prevailed on the earth have
risen by their virtues, and fallen through their vices,
that politics and ethics cannot be separated with safety.

There is a saying that “history is philosophy teach-
ing by example,” and it is certainly one of the best ways
to learn these lessons. Most of the Bible is pure his-

tory; selected passages in the life of a single race,

chosen with a view to their moral teachings. But the
Jewish is not unique in being suited for this purpose;
we should study the history of other nations in the
same way.

We should know also how God deals with the indi-
vidual, not confining our attention to those whose
biographies are given in the Bible, but studying any
life of which we have the necessary information, his-
torical characters as well as our friends and neighbors.
We need to know how men think and feel, what they do
and why. Such knowledge will make us more charita-
ble and sensible. We shall then know what it means
to “put yourself in another’s place” and learn the true
meaning of the Golden Rule.

We need to use greater wisdom in the study of the
Bible. There is no subject in the world so poorly
taught. We require an examination and a certificate
before we allow a person to teach our children arithme-

et

GROW IN GRACE AND KNOWLEDGE _ 199

tic and spelling, but we give anybody that is willing
to take a class in Sunday school the far more difficult
and important task of teaching religious truth. The
Bible is not an easy book to understand. It requires
long continued and intense study before we can get at
the real meaning of those who wrote so long ago and
under such different circumstances, and in foreign
tongues. It is quite easy to find somebody to “teach a
class in Sunday school” if you are not too particular as
to what is taught or how it is taught; but it is hard to
find any one sufficiently well qualified so as to be sure
that truth and not error is being taught.

We are, most of us, willing to talk but not willing
enough to think and learn. Yet the latter is the more
necessary. It is a poor teacher who does not spend
more time in the preparation of a lesson than in teach-
ing it. In the church the common custom is for the
minister to spend six days in studying and one day in
teaching. This period for preparation is none too long.
I have known preachers to whom I would have been
willing to extend this time to three or four weeks or
even longer.

Let each one of us apply his heart unto wisdom, and
in this way hasten the time to come, when “the earth
shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the
Lord, as the waters cover the sea.”

THE GEOMETRY OF ETHICS

Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto
life, and few there be that find it—Matthew 7: 14.

You may, if your arithmetic is erratic, add up a
column of figures a dozen times and get different sums.
Only one is correct. It is necessarily the same about
the more complicated problems of life, only we cannot
see it so clearly. Elementary mathematics is the only
science man has mastered so he can put real confidence
in the results of his ratiocination.

Science, which aims at certainty, approaches it by
the method of trial and error, thousands of trials, thou-
sands of errors, before an approximation to the truth
is attained. Truth is one; falsehoods are infinite.

Nine-tenths of the ideas that come into our heads are
wrong. The object of education is to select the one
that is right.

Nine-tenths of the impulses that beset us are wrong.
The task of civilization is to suppress the nine.

No matter how complex the problem, there is never
more than one right answer, one right way out, one
strait and narrow path, hard to find and hard to follow,
one road leading out of the maze of many false turns;
all the others are blind alleys or paths that return upon
themselves.

It is an axiom of plane geometry that there can be
only one straight line connecting two points. From the

point where we are to the point where we wish to go,
200

“os

ROADS OF DESTINY 201

there is only one short straight road; all the other pos-
sible paths are more or less divergent and devious.

The rules of conduct are as invariable and absolute
as the rules of geometry. The only difference is that
we cannot see so clearly in ethics as in mathematics.
The falling of a fog makes our road obscure, but does
not alter its length or direction.

There is only one best move in a game of chess,
whether we know what it is or not. There is only one
wisest action in any emergency, whether we know what
it is or not.

There are no indifferent actions, no equivalent
choices. It may seem a matter of indifference which
street you turn down in your morning stroll, but that
is because you do not know what fate awaits you
around the corner. If you turn down First Street you
may be run over by an automobile. If you turn down
Second Street you may meet a man who will make your
fortune. If you turn down Third Street you may
catch a fatal microbe. If you turn down Fourth Street
you may see the girl you want to marry.

If you knew, you could choose. But all the streets
look equally inviting, and not knowing which is the
best, you leave it to “chance.”’ You toss up a penny,
but it is not a matter of chance which face of the
penny falls uppermost, for that is determined by the in-
evitable interaction of the forces of gravitation and
rotary momentum.

Even if you could know what lay before you on each
of the optional avenues, you would not necessarily be
able to select the best. It may be that Second or
Fourth Street would lead you to more unhappiness

202 THE GEOMETRY OF ETHICS

than First or Third. Not knowing which is the most
fortunate road, you would be grateful if on that morn-
ing you should find all the others blocked by signs of
“Street closed. Detour.” You would be glad to be
forced into good fortune if you could not find your own
way. Nobody wants freedom of choice except in those
cases where choice would lead him toward his goal,
whatever that may be.

Nobody has the right to do wrong. Nobody but a
congenital idiot would claim such a right and nobody
but an incorrigible criminal would want to exercise it.
Every sane man wants to do what is for his best inter-
ests and every good man wants to do what is for the
best interests of others as well.

There can be no two opinions about this. The only
thing we disagree about is what is for the best interests
of ourselves and society. This is due solely to our ig-
norance, for if we all knew always what was best to do,
we should of course all want to do it. But, because we
don’t and can’t always know, we have to allow con-
siderable latitude as to thought and action, the more
latitude in those fields where there is the more uncer-
tainty. There is obviously but one course that ought
to be pursued or would be pursued if we could know
in advance the outcome of all our options.

RELIGION AND RELATIVITY?

Beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with
the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.—
II Peter 3:8.

I READ recently in the papers that one of the bishops
had warned the schools of his denomination to beware
of Einstein as well as Darwin.

I was glad to see that. I did not know that the
bishops had heard of Einstein, although I knew that
they were beginning to take Darwin seriously, sixty-
five years after the appearance of The Origin of
Species. Ignorant opposition is a better sign than ig-
norant indifference. I was afraid that our ecclesiastical
authorities would not get around to Einstein till 1970,
when scientists would be busy about something else.

Another encouraging thing about it is that the good

1 Preachers will probably say of this that it is not a sermon and
that a congregation would not listen to such a discussion of physical
and metaphysical questions. ‘The first criticism I would not ven-
ture to dispute, since they know better than I what constitutes a
sermon. But on the second point I know they are wrong, for it
has been tried out in various church forums and the people have
not only heard it through patiently but lingered as long after to
ask questions. I don’t say that this would be profitable preaching
fifty-two times a year, but I do think that many preachers fail to
realize the interest taken in such topics. I may add that all the
“sermons” in this volume have been put to this test. They have
been gradually hammered into shape on the heads of congrega-
tions of divers denominations, and all I have done in preparing
them for the press is to add quotations where needed to substan-
tiate points and to append references to sources and further reading.

203

204 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

bishop perceives that such a revolutionary conception
in the domain of psysics as the theory of relativity
could not leave altogether unaffected our philosophy of
the universe, and hence our ethics and our religion. In
this he is wiser than some of our leading scientists who
say that relativity is a purely mathematical conception
with which the common man has no concern, for it is of
no practical importance and so cannot affect his views
or conduct. Well, so was the Copernican theory. It
really does not make any difference to us whether we
regard the sun as a Satellite of the earth or not, yet it
did make quite a commotion in the theological world at
the time, and the change of man’s point of view of the
universe has profoundly influenced the current of hu-
man affairs ever since.

Pope Paul V was quite right in thinking that it con-
cerned the Church. The Inquisitors were quite within
their rights, although they may have been wrong, in
expressing their opinion that to believe “that the sun
is the center and does not revolve about the earth, is
foolish, absurd, false in theology, and heretical, because
expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” But Cardinal
Bellarmin was quite wrong in commanding Galileo “in
the name of his Holiness, the pope, and the whole Con-
gregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether
the opinion that the sun is the center of the world and
immovable, and that the earth moves, or henceforth to
hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever ver-
bally or in writing.”

The lesson that modern churchmen should learn from
the Galileo case is not that they should ignore scientific
speculation, not that they should be afraid to express

THAT GALILEO AFFAIR 205

their opinion as to its bearing on theology and ethics,
but rather that they should seriously study such ques-
tions and not assume too hastily that the acceptance
of the new notion would be fatal to the faith. For if in
spite of their protest the theory finds acceptance and
the faith still survives, they are left in the embarrassing
position of the doctor who daily meets on the street the
man whom he told ten years ago that he had only six
months to live, and who invariably greets him with the
cordial inquiry: “How is your health, doctor?” Re-
ligion has survived so many “death blows” in the course
of the last ten thousand years that we may assume that
it will not come to a violent end in our time. It is in
more danger of succumbing to sleeping sickness.

As we can now look back upon the battlefield of 1616
from the height which science has since won, and can
see both sides of it, we are struck with the futile folly
of the whole affair. A modern astronomer would agree
with the Pope that the sun is not immovable; in fact,
he measures its motion, relative to the fixed stars, which
he now knows are not “fixed” either. The modern
mathematician, regarding all motion as relative, will
admit that the choice between the two hypotheses is es-
sentially a matter of convenience. By assuming that
the sun is stationary and that the earth revolves around
it, and rotates on its own axis, astronomical calcula-
tions become simplified; and other phenomena, such as
the flattening of the poles and the shifting of the Fou-
caultian pendulum, fit into the same theory, whereas on
the theory of a fixed earth we should have to assume
extra and inconvenient hypotheses to explain them.
But the astronomer, like the rest of us, uses the Ptole-

206 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

maic theory in preference to the Copernican on all ordi-
nary occasions. In his most serious treatises he will
say, “The sun rises” at such a time, just as he says,
“The moon rises,” and if you point out the contradic-
tion, he does not seem a bit ashamed of his lapse to the
old and exploded theory. He uses the heliocentric
theory in explaining the structure of the solar system
because it is more convenient. He uses the geocentric
the rest of the time for the same reason.”

The adoption of the relativist point of view does not
relieve the odium that rests upon the Inquisitors who
forced Galileo to recant. On the contrary, it makes it
worse for them and better for Galileo. For if it is mere
matter of convenience whether we assume the earth or
the sun to be the stationary body, they had no right to
punish those who chose the alternative hypothesis, or to
prohibit their advocating it. On the other hand, while
we should all respect Galileo more if he had stuck to
his right of free thought and free speech and suffered

2“The two propositions, ‘The earth turns’ and ‘it is more con-
venient to suppose the earth turns round,’ have the same meaning;
there is nothing more in the one than in the other.” (Poincaré:
Science and Hypothesis, p. 85.)

Freundlich, Director of the Einstein Tower at Potsdam, says that
rotations, like linear motions, are to be regarded as relative, so,
“whether we assume that the earth is at rest and the bodies circle
round the earth, or that the bodies are at rest and the earth is
rotating on its axis, is fundamentally unessential in describing the
whole event.” Therefore it is “just as admissible to interpret the
observed facts” in one way as the other. (See Freundlich, The
Theory of Relativity, pp. 18, 90; The Foundations of Einstein’s
Theory of Gravitation, pp. 91-94.)

Cyrano de Bergerac, who was by no means such a fool as
Rostand makes him out to be, said, ““When I pirouette it is the same
as if I stood still and the world turned round.”

ORIGINATING SPECIES 207

martyrdom for it, we can see more excuse for him if he
actually took the scientific view of the question and
regarded the heliocentric theory as an ingenious and
useful speculation, which indeed was the way he pre-
sented it in the very “Dialogo” that got him into trou-
ble. A scientist really does not care much whether you
call his theory an “established fact” or a “working hy-
pothesis,” so long as you let him use it in his business.
The biologists are so busy nowadays originating new
species of plants and animals that it is hard to get them
to take as much interest as they ought to in what hap-
pens to The Origin of Species.

The scientific man, especially the scientific investi-
gator, holds his theories with a light hand, but keeps a
firm grip on his facts. This is just the opposite of the
Jay attitude toward science. If the layman is interested
in knowing the speed of light it is only because he
thinks that he learns from it that all space is filled with
a rigid elastic solid, at which he cannot but wonder.
The scientist is interested in the ether only because it
helps him in his calculation of the speed of light.

A lecturer on wireless telephony will use in the
course of the hour two or three more or less contradic-
tory conceptions of electricity, the older one-fluid
theory, the later two-fluid theory, and the modern elec-
tron theory. If afterward you ask him which is right
and which is wrong, you will not get a very satisfactory
answer. He does not know and obviously does not
care. You insist upon his telling you which theory he
personally believes in. He really had not thought of
“believing” in any of them. If he uses white chalk on
the blackboard in preference to red it is not because he

208 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

denies the existence of red chalk and its occasional use-
fulness. The botanist alludes to a certain flower as a
“poppy” and again as “Eschscholtzia.” He means the
same thing but is using different languages; in the first
case English, in the second case I don’t know what.

At present physicists are in the amusing situation of
having to use two irreconcilable, or at least irreconciled,
theories of light. The ether-wave theory is needed to
explain interference. The corpuscular theory is needed
to explain the spectrum. So as Sir William Bragg puts
it: * “On Mondays; Wednesdays, and Fridays we use
the wave theory; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Satur-
days we think in streams of flying energy, quanta, or
corpuscles.”

Such inconsistencies, or antinomies, due to irrecon-
cilable, or at least irreconciled, facts or theories, occur
in science as they do in philosophy, theology and daily
life. The apparent contradiction may persist for
years, centuries, perhaps forever. Some of the best
known and most persistent of such antinomies are
those between mind versus matter, free-will versus de-
terminism, atomicity versus continuity, the one versus
the many, the omnipotence of God versus the existence
of evil, absolute altruism versus essential selfishness,
and nationalism versus internationalism. Metaphysi-
cians have been disputing over some of them for 2500
years without either side being able to deliver a knock-
out blow to the opposite party, but scientists do not
bother much about discordant theories, having found
that they do not seriously interfere with investigation.
On the contrary they often stimulate research in the

3 Discovery, Sept., 1921.

HARMLESS INCONSISTENCIES 209

effort to eliminate the discrepancy. None of us can be
completely consistent either in philosophy or conduct
of life.

Professor E. W. Stewart of the University of Iowa
in discussing ‘“The Value of Inconsistency” in the
Scientific Monthly of February, 1925, with Emerson’s
observation, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds,” as a text, points out many cases in the
history of science where inconsistency has led to im-
portant discoveries while consistency has often retarded
progress. He concludes:

It is distressing to witness the somewhat insistent belief
of young people that religious faith and scientific knowledge
must be in agreement. . . . That there is no contradiction
found in science to the most fundamental concepts of the
theologian is far more important than the disagreements in
minor details. While every one should wish for no conflict
between science and theology, consistency is not an imme-
diate goal and inconsistency must be anticipated as a nor-
mal accompaniment of progress in such widely separated
fields. He who spends his time attempting to reconcile the
teachings of science and of theology surely cannot have a
very important function in contributing to the progress of
either. Scientific theories are to be lived and not merely
believed. He who is engaged in the encouragement of the
application of theory in either field is aiding in the prog-
ress of the world. By his devotion to a cause and his will-
ingness to be inconsistent without worry, he can make a
definite contribution. . . . Emerson was right; past opin-
ions should not cause excessive mental inertia. But the
above conclusions take us much farther. Inconsistency in
opinions held at one moment may be necessary for prog-
ress and the individual should accept this view and cease

210 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

to regard complete consistency as always either desirable or
valuable.

It is eminently desirable that people should have
faith in science, but in order to have that they must
have the same sort of faith in it that the scientist has.
Otherwise they will regard it as a lot of ingenious fan-
cies which are proved false by each succeeding genera-
tion. Science is molting just now and looks queer. The
public ought to understand clearly that the process
means growth and not disease.

Revolutions in science never go backwards and they
differ from political revolutions in that nothing worth
saving is lost in transition. The new theory must al-
ways include all that the old one does and more. In
their struggle for existence, formulas fight like snakes;
the one that can swallow the other beats.

I have gone back to Galileo for two reasons; first,
because it is a good example of how not to treat a new
scientific idea; and, second, because the Einstein theory
is a continuation of the same development of thought,
is meeting with the same sort of blind resistance and
is liable to lead to popular misconceptions, as did the
Copernican and Darwinian theories. It is already ap-
parent that the occultists are planning to use the fourth
dimension as an attic to put spooks in.

Professor Eddington of Cambridge, the leading Brit-
ish authority on relativity, discussed all three of these
points in his Romanes Lecture at Oxford in 1922 * from
which I quote the concluding paragraphs:

4“The Theory of Relativity and Its Influence on Scientific
Thought,” printed in the Scientific Monthly.

FREEING FETTERED THOUGHT 211

The present revolution of scientific thought follows in
aatural sequence on the great revolutions at earlier epochs
in the history of science. LEinstein’s special theory of rela-
tivity, which explains the indeterminateness of the frame
of space and time, crowns the work of Copernicus who first
led us to give up our insistence on a geocentric outlook on
nature; Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which re-
veals the curvature or non-Euclidean geometry of space
and time, carries forward the rudimentary thought of those
earlier astronomers who first contemplated the possibility
that their existence lay on something which was not flat.
These earlier revolutions are still a source of perplexity in
childhood, which we soon outgrow; and a time will come
when Einstein’s amazing revelations have likewise sunk into
the commonplaces of educated thought.

To free our thought from the fetters of space and time
is an aspiration of the poet and the mystic, viewed some-
what coldly by the scientist who has too good reason to
fear the confusion of loose ideas likely to ensue. If others
have had a suspicion of the end to be desired, it has been
left to Einstein to show the way to rid ourselves of these
“terrestrial adhesions to thought.” And in removing our
fetters he leaves us, not (as might have been feared) vague
generalities for the ecstatic contemplation of the mystic,
but a precise scheme of world-structure to engage the
mathematical physicist.

My purpose here is merely to show that there is rel-
ativity between the theory of relativity and religion.
I shall not attempt to explain what the theory is,’ still
less what it means to religious thought. This is a task

5] have attempted to put into popular language some of the rela-
tively simple aspects of relativity in Easy Lessons in Einstein, and
I have gone further in my Chats on Science, by putting the theory
into words of one syllable.

212 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

that will take a hundred years of hard thinking at the
least. If the theologians do not want to bother about
it until the question “has been settled by science” that
is their privilege, only they must not complain if some-
time in the twenty-first century they wake up to the
fact that it has not been settled to their satisfacion,
and that it is too firmly settled in the popular mind to
be upset. Meantime they will be getting more and more
out of touch with the trend of thought and will be miss-
ing a lot of fun.

It should be observed that there are three different
theories of relativity and innumerable versions and
ramifications of them. There is, first, the metaphysi-
cal theory of relativity, the idea that all our measure-
ments of space, time, and motion are merely relative,
which dates back to Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus.
There is, second, the special theory of relativity enun-
ciated by Einstein in 1905 to explain the conflict of ex-
periments on ether drift. And third, the generalized
theory of 1915, in which Einstein extended the concep-
tion of relativity to include gravitation, which he
ascribed to the structure of time and space, rather than
the hypothetical attractive force invoked by Newton.
The Einstein theories differ from the ancient theory in
being definite mathematical systems capable of being
verified or refuted at some points by certain very deli-
cate astronomical and physical measurements. So far
the experimental evidence of the last ten years is on the
whole in favor of Einstein,® although it is regarded as

6 There is at present only one piece of experimental evidence
against Einstein, the report in 1925 by Prof. D. C. Miller that his
repetition of the Michelson-Morley experiment on Mt. Wilson
showed a partial drift of the ether.

ORTHODOX RELATIVITY 213

inconclusive by many scientists. It is yet too early to
say whether Einstein’s mathematical schemes will be
incorporated intact into our science or in what ways
they will be restricted, expanded, or modified. But it
is already evident that the theory of relativity, to-
gether with Planck’s quantum theory and Bohr’s atomic
theory, which are contemporary and closely connected
with it, have definitely and permanently altered our
ideas of the universe. Whatever may be their future
fate, they have already proved their value in correlating
unconnected facts and in guiding research into new
fields.

That they will have an effect upon religious thought
is also apparent, not only from the alarm of the bishop
to whom I referred in the beginning, but even more
significantly by the efforts now made to assimilate the
new ideas to the old doctrines.

That relativity is not necessarily incompatible with
the old theology is shown by the fact that the honor of
being a forerunner of Einstein is claimed for both St.
Thomas Aquinas ‘ and Jonathan Edwards.*

Let us consider one instance of the possible bearing
of the new ideas upon religious thought. One of the
popular delusions that religion has always had to fight,
as has science also, is our common crude conception of
matter as something essentially solid, unalterably
heavy, impenetrable, continuous, unmoving, inert, inde-
structible. Democritus and Lucretius struck a blow at
this idea when they advanced the notion that all ma-
terial bodies were composed of invisible atoms inces-

7™In the London Nation, Dec. 27, 1919.
8In Science, Oct. 29, 1920.

214 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

santly in motion, but it took some two thousand years
for their view to gain general acceptance, if indeed it
has yet penetrated the common mind. A hundred years
ago Dalton took it up and it became the basis of mod-
ern physics and chemistry, but the atoms were still
looked upon as little round hard things, incapable of
decomposition.

But according to present conceptions an atom con-
sists of an inconceivably minute nucleus, charged with
positive eletricity, around which revolve from one (in
hydrogen) to ninety-two (in uranium) satellites of
negative electricity at speeds ranging from 1,300 to
124,000 miles per second. That is, the actual amount
of matter, if you can still regard it as material, in an ap-
parently solid body occupies only about a million-mil-
lionth part of its bulk, and if we could put a big man
into a press and squeeze all the vacant space out of him
he would shrink to a pinhead size.°

We may go further and say that this amount of mat-
ter, little as it is, does not remain constant either in
mass or in substance. For according to Einstein it in-
creases in mass the faster it travels up to the speed of
light, and faster it cannot go. This leaves only one of
Newton’s three laws of motion intact, the action-equals-
reaction one.*° Matter itself is now regarded as a form
of energy, or as transformable into energy.

It is supposed that all the other chemical elements
are built up out of hydrogen atoms as a wall is built of
bricks. The first step of this process would be to build
a helium atom out of four atoms of hydrogen. But this

9 Atoms and Rays, by Sir Oliver Lodge, p. 14.
10 Lodge, p. 195.

THE ANNIHILATION OF MATTER cdi ty

involves the annihilation of matter and the creation of
energy. If, for instance, it were possible to transform
10,077 pounds of hydrogen into helium, only 10,000
pounds of helium would be produced. The remaining
seventy-seven pounds—no, that is wrong, for it would
not remain—I should say rather, the other seventy-
seven pounds, would vanish from the material world and
in its place an enormous amount of energy would be
produced, passing off presumably as radiant light and
heat. This transformation has not yet been accom-
plished in the laboratory but several young scientists
are experimenting along this line and they may some-
time succeed. It would be very handy to be able to
make helium for our dirigibles at will and get enough
power to run them thrown in free. It is believed that
the light that we get from the sun and stars comes
largely from such decomposition of matter into energy.
Four million tons of the sun’s mass is estimated to be
evaporating off every second in the form of light.

This is such a decided change of view from the con-
ceptions held in the last century, and still holding in the
minds of most men, that it has been referred to as “‘the
dematerialization of matter.” **

Charles Nordmann, astronomer to the Paris Observa-
tory, concludes:

11 Rougier, Philosophy and the New Physics, p. 62. Dr. J. H.
Jeans in his new theory of the source of light in the sun and stars
suggests that the negative electrons and the positive nucleus of
the atoms may fall together and by so neutralizing their charges
annihilate one another and pass away “in a blaze of glory.” He
says: “Nothing in the suggestion appears to conflict with modern
atomic physics.” (Nature, Dec. 6, 1924; Jan. 24, 1925.)

12 Einstein and the Universe, p. 115.

216 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

From all this it follows, by calculation and by the simple
and elegant reasoning of Einstein, of which I here convey
only the faintest adumbration, that mass and energy are
the same thing, or are at least the two different sides of
one and the same coin. There is, then, no longer a mate-
rial mass. ‘There is nothing but energy in the external
universe. A strange—in a sense, an almost spiritual—turn
for modern physics to take.

Physicists whose profession is the study of matter do
not take matter so materialistically as do other people.
Poincaré says:

Masses are coefficients it is convenient to introduce into
calculations. We could reconstruct all mechanics by at-
tributing different values to all the masses. This new
mechanics would not be in contradiction either with expe-
rience or with the general principles of dynamics. Only
the equations of this new mechanics would be less simple.**

But do not fall into the error of supposing that “sci-
ence has proved that matter does not exist.” To ex-
plain a thing is not to explode it. If the concept of
matter is, as all our concepts must be, a fabrication of
the mind, this does not imply that we can get along
without it. Although the physicist reduces matter to a
small italic m, stone is still heavy, and steel is still
sharp. And a stone will bruise and a steel will pierce
just as much as if we had not found out its formula.
We do not change nature when we change our minds.

Yet it does make a difference, after all, how we look
upon the external world. The more we know about

13 Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, p. 76.

HOW MIND SHAPES REALITY 217

matter, the better we can manage it. And when we
realize that the laws of nature are made in our own
minds they cannot hold our minds in bondage. The
crass materialism of former centuries should be impos-
sible in the future.

As it is important to understand just what the
relativist means when he speaks of the part the mind
takes in the formulation of the laws of nature and in
the selection of fundamental concepts, I will quote from
one of the best authorities on the question, Professor
Eddington of Cambridge: **

Mind filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of
qualities, as the prism filters out the colors of the rainbow
from the chaotic pulsations of white light. Mind exalts
the permanent and ignores the transitory; and it appears
from the mathematical study of relations that the only
way in which mind can achieve her object is by picking
out one particular quality as the permanent substance of
the perceptual world, partitioning a perceptual time and
space for it to be permanent in, and, as a necessary conse-
quence of this Hobson’s choice, the laws of gravitation and
mechanics and geometry have to be obeyed. Is it too much
to say that mind’s search for permanence has created the
world of physics? . . . The conclusion is that the whole
of those laws of nature which have been woven into a
unified scheme—mechanics, gravitation, electro-dynamics
and optics—have their origin, not in any special mecha-
nism of nature, but in the workings of the mind.

14TIn his Space, Time and Gravitation, probably the best book to
give the general reader some idea of the new theories and their
significance. A later book, Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of the
Atom, is also commendable for this purpose,

218 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

The theologians do not seem to know a friend when
they see him. They have always insisted that the
material universe is finite in space and time, but they
view with suspicion the relativists, who not only believe
it but undertake to prove it and to measure its dimen-
sions.*°

According to the theory of relativity, the space-and-
time framework in which all things happen may be re-
garded as rolled into a sort of four-dimensional sphere,
so that the universe is limited although unbounded; it
has no end and yet is not immeasurably great. We
know that it is so with the surface of our earth. One
might travel forever in any direction without reaching
the end of the earth, yet he could never get more than
twelve thousand miles from home, for if he went farther
he would be nearing his starting point. So too a ray of
light starting out from anywhere in any direction would
on account of the curvature of space return in the
course of time to its origin, and this time is estimated
at a thousand million years. From this corollary of
the relativity theory, Professor Eddington deduces
some curious consequences:

A ray of light from the sun would thus take about 1,000
million years to go round the world; and after the journey
the rays would converge again at the starting point, and
then diverge for the next circuit. The convergent would
have all the characteristics of a real sun so far as light and
heat are concerned, only there would be no substantial body

15 “The finite character of the universe appears capable of ex-
perimental demonstration.’ Gumbel, Science Abstracts, 25, No.
257-

SUN GHOSTS 219

present. Thus corresponding to the sun we might see a
series of ghosts occupying the positions where the sun was
I,000, 2,000, 3,000, etc., million years ago, if (as seems
probable) the sun has been luminous for so long.

It is rather a pleasing speculation that records of the pre-
vious states of the sidereal universe may be automatically
reforming themselves on the original sites. Perhaps one or
more of the many spiral nebulz are really phantoms of
our own stellar system. Or it may be that only a propor-
tion of the stars are substantial bodies; the remainder are
optical ghosts revisiting their old haunts.1®

This means that if the world is round—I mean the
whole universe, not our own minor planet—a ray of
light would roll round and round in it like a ball inside
a roulette wheel, or rather, since that simile will be in-
comprehensible to you, like the marble of pigs-in-
clover. Although the light from the sun disperses in
every direction all the rays come together again at this
antipodal focus, only to scatter and meet at their
original rendezvous. Except of course such of them
as get lost on the way by running up against planets
or being absorbed by drifting dust or pulled out of the
straight track by gravitation, as Einstein discovered.
Stars may have their doubles at opposite points.

It is an interesting idea, anyhow, and probably some
preacher, some real preacher, will pick it up and make
a sermon out of it. For the sun is not the only thing
that is dogged by the images of its past selves. We
shine too, although only by reflected light. It must be,

16 Space, Time and Gravitation, p. 161.

220, RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

then, that our radiations are traveling about some-
where in the world and will be reproducing our looks
and acts on the cinema screen of the farthest horizon
of space and time a thousand million years after we
are dead. If we are going to have that sort of immor-
tality imposed upon us, we would prefer to pick our
poses. The moral of it is—although probably the
preacher would draw a different one—that if we are
going to do anything we are ashamed of we should go
inside the house and pull down the blinds or wait till it
is dark. But this Jesson is needless, for such precau-
tions are customary. Even then one can’t feel quite
safe in sinning. There are the X-rays, you know—and
nobody knows what other invisible pencils may be
registering all our actions or even thoughts—or, what’s
worse, the desires that we don’t dare think. They, too,
must leave their mark somewhere.

The implications of the relativity theory in regard
to time are quite as startling as those in regard to space.
Time and space are indeed so inseparably connected
that we cannot even conceive of them independently.
Einstein “assumes that there is a fundamental relation
between time and space, such that, to put it simply, no
one can tell what time it is until he knows where he is,
and he cannot tell where he is until he knows when he
is.”’ nay

The theory suggests the possibility, though it does not
imply the actuality, of a reversal of time, or the over-
lapping of past and future, “‘so that, in principle, it is
possible to experience events now that will in part be an

17] borrow this concise expression from Prof. A. G. Webster,
The Review, Jan. 31, 1920.

THE PASSING OF MATERIALISM 221

effect of my future resolves and actions.” ** One of the
deepest thinkers of our day, Prof. Alfred North White-
head of Harvard University, in the following passage
from his book on The Concept of Nature shows how
widely the trend of twentieth-century thought differs
from the mechanistic and materialistic conceptions pre-
vailing in the last century:

The materialistic theory has all the completeness of the
thought of the middle ages, which had a complete answer
to everything, be it in heaven or hell or in nature. There
is a trimness about it, with its instantaneous present, its
vanished past, its non-existent future, and its inert matter.
This trimness is very medieval and ill accords with brute
facts.

The theory which I am urging admits a greater ultimate
mystery and a deeper ignorance. The past and future meet
and mingle in an ill-defined present. The passage of na-
ture, which is only another name for the creative force of
existence, has no narrow ledge of definite instantaneous
present within which to operate. Its operative presence
which is now urging nature forward must be sought for
throughout the whole, in the remote past as well as the
narrowest breadth of any present duration. Perhaps also
in the unrealized future. Perhaps also in the future which
might be as well as the actual future which will be.

The possibility of a new conception of the relations
of past and future was discussed at the Aristotelian So-

18 From Space, Time, Matter, by Hermann Weyl. I have dis-
cussed this point in the chapter “T'angling Up the Time-Line” of
Chats on Science. Esclangon goes so far as to propose an experi-
ment to prove the inversion of time as a reality. Comptes Rendus
173:1340 (1921).

1s 4 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

ciety by Dean Inge of St. Paul’s, one of the few clergy-
men of our time who are interested in metaphysical
questions. I quote from the London 77mes report:

We happen to be moving away from 1900 and towards
1930, just as the earth happens to revolve in one direction
and not in the other. But can 1900 and 1930 not both be
equally real, each holding its fixed position in an unchange-
able series?

Were that so, the direction of the stream of time would
have a meaning only for us, and might have the opposite
meaning for other consciousnesses, and no meaning for an
absolute consciousness. The interest of the speculation ex-
tends from time to cause and effect. A common concep-
tion of causation involves the idea of a transaction between
two things of which the one is active, the other passive.
But this interpretation of cause is being replaced in science
by the idea that “cause” and “effect” indicate nothing
more than different positions in the time sequence. When
we speak of the past determining the future, we may also
speak of the future justifying, explaining, or even deter-
mining the past. Past and future, cause and effect, may
indeed be mere aspects of a timeless reality.

This reminds us that St. Thomas Aquinas taught that
God sees past, present, and future at once as an eternal
present. It also reminds us of the verse:

Time flies.
But no,
Time stays,
We go.’®

19 A free translation from Ronsard.

IS NATURE RATIONAL? 223

Let me give you one other hint of the strange specu-
lative possibilities suggested by the new physics, al-
though it is a blow to man’s conceit in assuming that
the universe is made after the manner of his own mind,
that he can ever reason it out. I quote the concluding
passage of Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of the Atom:

The theory of relativity has shown that most of tradi-
tional dynamics, which was supposed to contain scientific
laws, really consisted of conventions as to measurement,
and was strictly analogous to the “‘great law” that there are
always three feet to a yard. In particular, this applies to
the conservation of energy. This makes it plausible to
suppose that every apparent law of nature which strikes us
as reasonable is not really a law of nature, but a concealed
convention, plastered on to nature by our love of what we,
in our arrogance, choose to consider rational. Eddington
hints that a real law of nature is likely to stand out by the
fact that it appears to us irrational, since in that case it is
less likely that we have invented it to satisfy our intel-
lectual taste. And from this point of view he inclines to
the belief that the quantum-principle is the first real law
of nature that has been discovered in physics.

This raises a somewhat important question: Is the world
“rational,” i.e., such as to conform to our intellectual hab-
its? Or is it “irrational,” ie., not such as we should have
made it if we had been in the position of the Creator?

Since little thought has as yet been given to the in-
fluence of the doctrine of relativity upon social and
ethical questions, I will conclude with a quotation from
Viscount Haldane, who has given special attention to
that point in his work on The Reign of Relativity:

224 RELIGION AND RELATIVITY

Assuming the principle of relativity to mean all that has
been said, what guidance does it offer for the conduct of
our individual lives? I do not think that the question is
‘a difficult one to answer. The real lesson which the prin-
ciple of the relativity of knowledge teaches us is always
to remember that there are different orders in which both
our knowledge and the reality it seeks have differing
forms. These orders we must be careful to distinguish and
not to confuse. We must keep ourselves aware that truth
in terms of one order may not necessarily be a sufficient
guide in the search for truth in another one. We have, in
other words, to be critical of our categories. As an aid to
our practice, the principle points us in a direction where
we may possess our souls with tranquillity and courage.
We stand warned against ‘‘other-worldliness” in a multitude
of concealed forms. We are protected, too, if the doctrine
be well-founded, against certain specters which obtrude
themselves in the pilgrim’s path. Materialism, scepticism,
and obscurantism alike vanish. The real is there, but it is
akin in its nature to our own minds, and it is not terrify-
ing. Death loses much of its sting and the grave, of its
victory. For we have not only the freedom that is of the
essence of mind, but we are encouraged to abstract and
withdraw ourselves from the apparent overwhelmingness of
pain and even of death itself. Such things cease to be of
the old importance when they lose the appearance of final
reality.

There may come to us, too, contentment of spirit, and a
peace which passes our everyday understanding. We grow
in tolerance, for we see that it is in expression rather than
in intention that our fellow-men are narrow. We realize
that we are all of us more, even in moments of deep depres-
sion, than we appear to ourselves to be, and that humanity
extends beyond the limits that are assigned even by itself
to itself.

THE CREED OF RELATIVITY 225

It is a creed that if it be true helps those who can make
it their own to dispel obscurities, and to lighten for them-
selves and for others the burden and the apparent mystery
of human life. It is a creed that stimulates the practice of
unselfishness in social and religious life, interpreted as fully
harmonizing with the dictates of philosophical thought. “If
any man shall do His will, he shall know of the doctrine!”

THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up chil-
dren unto Abraham.

And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees; therefore
every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and
cast into the fire.

I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that
cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy
to bear: he shali baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire:

Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor,
and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the
chaff with unquenchable fire-—Matthew 3: 9-12.

IN visiting one of the states where efforts were being
made to pass a law prohibiting the teaching of evolu-
tion I was told of a lobbyist who approached a mem-
ber of the legislature with the remark that he had been
informed on the best authority that there was an evolu-
tionist in the state university.

“Great heavens!” replied the hortified legislator,
“You don’t mean to say that he practices it, do you?”

In this the legislator showed that practical common
sense which is fortunately so often characteristic of our
politicians. He was of course wrong in assuming so
hastily that the practice of the principles of evolution
would necessarily be wrong. But he got straight at the
root of the matter when he saw at first glance that the
important question was their application to the con-
duct of life.

Not all our theologians have shown the same per-

spicacity. They have been so absorbed in the specula-
226

EVOLUTION IN ACTION 227

tive and historical aspects of the question that they
have ignored its vital relation to present-day problems
within their own field. They have dipped into geology
and embryology, where at the best their efforts could
not contribute much to the clarification of the question,
and have neglected to study the ethics of it, where their
expert aid was much needed. They have been much
concerned with the question whether the account of
creation given in the first chapters of Genesis was in
irreconcilable conflict with the account given in the
latest textbook on geology or whether the two could
be made to harmonize, with a bit of budging on both
sides.

But whether they agree or not, and whether we be-
lieve them both or neither, they both deal with a past
event, and a past event is of no value to us unless we
can bring it to bear upon the problems of the present.
Science and religion are alike in this, that they are, or
should be, forward-looking and practical. They both
make use of the records of the past for the interpreta-
tion of the present and for guidance in the future. The
creeds of the church and the textbooks of science are
of value, not because of the historic facts they contain,
but because of what they tell us of the fundamental
principles of the universe and human life that are per-
manent and perpetually applicable.*

The question whether man first appeared on this
planet 6,000 or 600,000 years ago does not matter ex-
cept in so far as we may learn from it how to extend his
period of survival. What we want to know is how long
man can exist: how long he has existed is in itself an

1 This important point I have discussed on pp. 66 and 148.

228 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

idle question. The question of how man was made be-
comes of importance only when we come to consider
what we can make of him. Then any minutest bit of
evidence that we can gather concerning his history and
ancestry becomes worth studying in the hope that it
may aid us to some general laws as to the nature and
development of living beings. Since we cannot tell in
advance what will come handy in our reconstruction of
the record of the world we gather up all the things that
seem to have significance and preserve them in our
museums and libraries, fragments of unknown fossils,
broken bricks of cuneiform inscriptions, scraps of un-
decipherable writing, scattered and disconnected facts.
But none of them is really of value until it can be fitted
into the general scheme of things.

There are many such unrelated things in our
museums; there are many in the Bible. Consider, for
instance, the account of the creation of woman, which
has somehow received less attention and aroused less
discussion than the creation of man, though no man
would say that it was an event of less importance. It
appears to be a unique event. There is no record in
Scripture or science of its having occurred before or
since. The Bibie does not imply that any other woman
was ever made that way. The rector’s wife in the town
where I lived used to teach her class that all men to
this day have one less rib than women because Adam
was deprived of one, but I understand that this is not
confirmed by anatomists, though I have to take their
statements on faith, not having made any dissections
myself. The incident is unrepeatable and hence un-

A WILD SURMISE 229

confirmable by experiment. Modern plastic surgery
has taken out ribs and made them into leg bones but
never so far into a complete woman.

What, then, can be done with the story of the crea-
tion of Eve? Nothing, absolutely nothing. A scientist
may believe it a part of an infallible revelation or he
may regard it as highly improbable that Eve was made
in a way so different from other women, but he can
neither prove nor disprove it. Whether he personally
believes it or not can make no possible difference to his
science, nor, so far as I can see, to his religion. Not
Eve, but her living daughter, is his problem and ours.

Let me generalize this view of our relation toward the
records of the past. Suppose I start a new religious
sect having for its fundamental tenet that the earth was
created instantaneously out of nothing by fiat of the
Almighty on January 1, 1925. IfI should take such a
stand I might have difficulty in gaining converts but I
could defy anybody to disprove my creed. Nobody
could say that it was impossible, for it would be just
as easy for Omnipotence to create a world in a second
as in six days, or six hundred million years; create it
complete, with people grown up, clothed, and housed,
with all the evidences of a remote past already made,
with fossils stored in the rocks, books stored in the
libraries and memories stored in the minds. Sir Wil-
liam Osler tells us that he can remember when the
professor of Natural Theology at Oxford argued that
the fossils found in sedimentary rocks were no evidence
of antiquity but were put there by Satan for the pur-
pose of testing faith in the Bible; they were petrified

230 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

temptations to infidelity, so to speak. Other objections
could be quite as easily disposed of. The Great War
of course never occurred, but the histories and recol-
lections of it were prepared by God for the purpose of
warning the human race against such folly and cruelty
in the future. The more I think about it, the more
enamored I am of the polemic possibilities of this doc-
trine of recent creation. If anybody would hire Car-
negie Hall for a joint debate on the question I believe
that I could defend the thesis against any arguments
that could be brought against it. Nobody has success-
fully confuted Archbishop Whately’s Historic Doubts
Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The point is that we can never be certain of any
event in the past in the same sense that we can be
certain of an event that we can today observe and re-
peat at will. History must necessarily remain on an
inferior plane of validity as compared with science, and
the historical sciences such as geology and archeology
can never attain the same certitude as the experimental
sciences such as physics and chemistry. For example,
we can never know for sure how life originated. It is
surmised that in the early ages certain colloidal par-
ticles composed of compounds of carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen, and oxygen, perhaps in contact with a catalyst
such as iron oxide, and under the influence of the ultra-
violet rays of sunshine, might have acquired the power
of feeding and fission, and so become the progenitors
of all future living beings. Certain biologists even be-
lieve it possible under some such conditions to produce
life now from inorganic matter and are experimenting to

LIVING TRUTH AND DEAD PAST 231

this end.” Suppose some day they should succeed and
find out a way of making an ameba out of the ele-
ments: it would not prove that life had originated on
the earth in that fashion. It might have come about in
some very different way. There is always a certain un-
certainty about any record of the past, whether it be
historical or geological, though the evidence for it may
be irresistibly convincing to one who considers it.
Fortunately, no vital truth is altogether dependent
for its validity upon the records of the past, although it
may have been derived from their study. If the Fun-
damentalists were to burn up all the books on evolu-
tion, as the papers report they are being burned in cer-
tain communities of our country, 1f they should prohibit
the teaching of evolution all over the world, that would
not suffice. They would have to go further and chisel
out all the fossils throughout the earth, for if they re-
main in the rocks somebody is sure to find them in time
and draw the same inferences from them as to their age
and origin. Suppose even this could be accomplished
and all the paleontological evidences of evolution elimi-
nated from the earth: evolution would still remain as
active an agent as ever in the molding of living beings.
Shutting our eyes does not affect the external world.
It only makes us stumble about in it. Suppose that the
Soviet should sweep over the earth and destroy all the
sacred books of every faith. God would still reign and,
2“Experimental abiogenesis is the goal of biology.”—Jacques
Loeb. “With the astonishing means that modern science possesses
already, with its continually increasing powers, I do not doubt that

it will some day be sufficiently equipped to produce life artificially.”
—Paul Becquerel.

232 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

I believe, mankind would again find Him in various
ways. God is not affected by what we think of him—
fortunately. He is not annihilated when we forget him.

Whether evolution be theory or hypothesis is hardly
worth discussing. What we need to know is how evolu-
tion acts. Whether evolution is fact or fable as applied
to the past, it is a force in the present. We can ignore
the past, or misconstrue it, without much harm, but we
have to deal with evolution as a ruling power in modern
life and a formative factor of the future.

Never was it so important that we should understand
evolution, for never was it so active as at present, when
new forms of plants and animals are being made to or-
der and when man has, for good or ill, learned how to
control the multiplication of the race. I quote from
one of the leading geneticists of the country, Dr.
C. B. Davenport, Director of the Station for Experi-
mental Evolution,* at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island:

There are now thousands of forms of animals and plants
that reproduce their kind which did not exist a century ago.
Within the last ten years there have been produced scores
of forms of the banana fly never before seen by the eye of
man. Indeed, the very day on which the ancestors of some
new types first appeared is known, and many of these types
have persisted to the present day.

We know indeed not a few forms which have appeared
recently and which fulfill the essential conditions of species
as the naturalist finds them in nature. These forms differ
by two or more constant traits from other species. They
are quite as infertile with other species as some wild species

3 Note that the name is not “Theoretical” or ‘Historical’ Evolu-
tion.

INVENTING NEW SPECIES 233

are with each other. The principal difference between them
and wild species is that their beginnings have been seen and
are known to be recent while that of wild species has not
been seen and so their origin is of unknown date. But it
is known that thousands of wild species that we have on
earth today did not exist in earlier geological ages, just as
there are thousands of species that lived in past geological
ages that are not living today.

Nowadays we hear some of the opponents of Darwin
asserting that no new species have arisen since the
world began. ‘This is amusing, for it shows that they
have not even read the title of the book they are at-
tacking. So let me give it in its full old-fashioned form
as it appeared in 1857: “‘On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.”

The point of Darwin’s argument was that there oc-
curred in nature a selective process similar to the arti-
ficial selection practiced by man. Nobody questioned
the fact that it was possible by proper selection and
breeding to develop new forms of dogs and pigeons,
fruits and flowers, that were so distinct that if they
had been found growing wild they would have been
classed as different species. The only question—and
this is questioned still by many good evolutionists—is
whether the struggle for life in nature works the same
way.

The importance of evolution as a policy appears
when we think that the future of the human race and
of any particular branch of it depends primarily upon
the quality and character of its posterity. The theory
of evolution has been a great stimulus to experimental

234 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

researches in heredity and many of its laws have been
discovered and verified. It is now known that physical
structure, mental abilities, and moral disposition are in-
herited according to mathematical ratios that can be
calculated in advance, where the data are ascertainable.
A child’s talents are limited like his fingers.

Neither collective wisdom nor individual piety can
prevent a nation from lapsing into incapacity and cor-
ruption if the breeding of coming generations comes
from the inferior rather than the superior stocks of the
community. It makes little difference in the long run
how the people cast their ballots. The fate of the
country is actually determined by how they combine
their chromosomes. The finest form of government is
futile unless it is managed by men of capacity. The
purest form of religion is bound to degenerate if the
quality of the population deteriorates.

By the application of such laws of eugenics as are
already known, and without infringing upon conven-
tional morality, it would be possible practically to
eliminate feeble-mindedness and hereditary viciousness
and to raise up a race that would be superior physically,
mentally and morally to any that the world has hith-
erto known.

Very little can be done in this direction by legisla-
tion. Very much could be done by moral suasion, by
holding up higher moral ideals, by instilling respect for
the race, responsibility for posterity, and unsefishness
in sacrificing present pleasures for the benefit of future
generations; in short, by preaching.

Here is a most influential function that the church
has languidly relinquished. While ministers are com-

THE EUGENICS OF ABRAHAM 235

plaining that the field of ecclesiastical activities has nar-
rowed through the taking over by the state of educa-
tion, charity, and the like,* they are neglecting a more
important field to which they have historic claim and
where they can exert a greater influence over the fu-
ture than in any other possible way. In primitive re-
ligions the priest had a great deal to say about what
marriages should be made. His modern successor
mostly confines himself to the perfunctory perform-
ance of the marriage ceremony.

If a new religious sect should arise, composed of
members of good hereditary stock and endowed with a
sufficient variety of desirable qualities, if such a com-
munity should strictly segregate itself, geographically
or socially, and maintain for a number of generations a
high standard of marital relationship and child welfare,
there would be developed a “peculiar people” that
would stand as high above the average of the world as
the highest races do now above the lowest. They could,
if they desired, rule the rest of the world through force
of sheer superiority of mind and moral purpose.

Something of this sort was attempted, according to
Prof. Ralph E. Danforth, with the children of Israel
but failed through their disobedience to the law of
Jehovah. I quote from his article on “Religion as a

Factor in Human Evolution”: °

Paleontology shows us that single individuals, or single
pairs, have been the starters of new species, rather than
great masses of individuals. The plan which was laid down
for Abraham, and conceived by him, would have produced

4See p. 32 on this point.
5In Scientific Monthly, Feb., 1925.

236 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

a new species of superior human beings if it had been con-
sistently and unfailingly carried out. Even as it is, with
all their breaches of the original sacred plan, the Jews are
a remarkable people, decidedly distinctive in many ways,
if not altogether in the ways originally planned. They
came very near to producing a new and distinct human
species, and although they fell short, they have pointed the
way in which it can be done... .

The plan proposed for Abraham and his descendants in-
volved pure line breeding, with careful selection of mates,
and a code of ethics highly moral, sanitary and religious.
The intense faith in the guiding supervision of God, the
Creator of all things, was a support without which the plan
never would have been carried out to such an extent and
during so long a period of time.

The genetic principle of selection and rejection which
some holy fathers have seen through a glass darkly in the
form of a doctrine of divine election, and which we, using
the symbolism of John the Baptist and of Jesus, may well
call the principle of the ax and the fan, was foreshadowed
in the plan of Abraham.

The plan of Abraham is as simple as nature itself, whose
deepest laws it involves; and it is as sure as physics and
chemistry through which God works, for any who will con-
sistently follow it through the generations, a thing which
the descendants of the old Abraham have done but faultily,
very faultily. It is equally the plan of Jesus, the plan of
nature, and the plan of the Kingdom of God and His
righteousness.

It shocks our sensibilities to read in regard to the
peoples of Palestine: ““When your God puts them into
your hands and you rout them, then you must extermi-
nate them, making no compact with them and showing

A SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR 237

them no mercy.” ® But we must not be too hasty in

condemning this policy. If the Canaanites were as bad
as they were painted, it would have been better for the
Jewish race and for the world at large if the Israelites
had obeyed the injunction of Jehovah instead of inter-
marrying with them as they did. But we cannot judge
of that, for we have the history from only one side.
Doubtless the “Book of the Wars of Jehovah,” ’ as
written by the enemy, would read differently from that
quoted in the Scriptures.

The method of selection as practiced in nature and
primitive peoples, the relentless struggle for existence
resulting in the survival of the fittest, involves appalling
waste and terrible suffering. For lack of knowledge it
was indiscriminating and sometimes failed of its object
in spite of its cruelty.®

We can nowadays secure the same results by milder
methods. We can, for instance, segregate, instead of
slaughtering, individuals possessing defects of body or
mind undesirable to perpetuate. Such negative and re-
strictive measures, however, would be of little avail un-
less accompanied by such positive eugenic measures as
would encourage earlier marriage and larger families
for the best of our young men and women. But this
requires a religious zeal and spirit of self-sacrifice, a

6 Deuteronomy 7:2.

7 Numbers 21:14.

8 For instance, if we assume that the Midianites were so hope-
lessly vile that their tribe were better wiped out, then Moses made
the slaughter unavailing by not ordering the killing of the female
children along with the male. As we now know, hereditary traits,
good and bad, pass equally down the female line and the 32,000
Midianite maidens so saved were sufficient to contaminate the en-
tire Hebrew race. Numbers 31:17, 18, 35.

238 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

sort of revival that no prophet has yet arisen to preach
though the salvation of society depends upon it.

But whether we live according to our lights or not,
the law is not abrogated. Natural forces continue to
act, even though we ignore tbem. The word “now” in
my text means now, not A.D. 26. It was an eternal
truth that John was enunciating. The ax and the fan
are perpetually at work, and if we do not pay heed to
them, so much the worse for us.

Natural selection is slow, cruel, and cumbrous. We
can produce new forms of plants and animals better
and quicker than nature can, as a visit to any exhibit
of horticulture or animal husbandry will show. That
is what our intelligence was given us for, that we may
improve upon the crude methods of nature.

But while we strive to improve upon them we must
not forget that we owe to them the development of
social virtues as well as personal prowess. A species
may survive and succeed in the struggle for existence
through the development of cooperation, of maternal
or paternal care for offspring, of self-sacrifice for. the
community, of ability to live with another race. It is
this that has produced the law of the pack, the spirit
of the herd, the communism of the hive and ant hill, the
commensalism of marine animals and insects, the home
life of the nest.°

The close relation between evolution and religion is
well brought out by Prof. William Patten, who teaches
evolution in Dartmouth College:

8 This side of evolution, too often overlooked, is emphasized in
Drummond’s Ascent of Man, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, and Pat-
ten’s Grand Strategy of Evolution.

EVOLUTION HELPS RELIGION 239

The compelling pragmatic law, which Darwin so clearly
saw in operation in plant and animal life, and which he
called ‘Natural Selection,” is the same law that is so clearly
expressed in biblical teachings, as, for example:

“And even now the ax is laid unto the roots of the trees:
therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is
hewn down and cast into the fire. ... But the root of
the righteous shall not be moved.”

Thus science and religion offer the same incentives to
action and have the same purposes to accomplish; and
science expresses in her more comprehensive formulas pre-
cisely what all the great religions of the past and present
have tried to express in their teachings, but without that
sure and intimate knowledge of Nature-action which science
gives us, and which is so essential to the truthfulness and
sanity of any kind of religion... .

And so, it seems to me that the study of evolution, as a
whole, more than anything else, will help to minimize the
antagonism between religiously minded and scientifically
minded people, and will help them to work more peacefully
and happily together. For young and old, for high-brow
and low-brow, the study of evolution makes life more sig-
nificant and more beautiful. It justifies their faith and
fortifies their ideals. It makes God a more immanent
reality. It helps all of us to understand the purpose of
life, and how to accomplish it.

That is why I teach evolution.

To those who say that a man cannot be an evolution-
ist and a Christian, we may reply after the manner of
the man who was asked if he believed in infant bap-
tism. “Believe in it!” he answered. “Why, of course!
I’ve seen it.” So we have all seen Christian evolution-
ists, thousands of them, and their existence cannot be

240 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

denied even by those who think they are inconsistent
and should abandon their religious or scientific beliefs.

Timid souls who have become alarmed at the idea
that religion and science are inevitable antagonists
should be assured by the “Joint Statement upon the
Relations of Religion and Science” which was drawn
up in 1923 by Prof. R. A. Millikan, of the California
Institute of Technology and Nobel prizeman, and reads
as follows:

We, the undersigned, deeply regret that in recent con-
troversies there has been a tendency to present science and
religion as irreconcilable and antagonistic domains of
thought, for in fact they meet distinct human needs, and
in the rounding out of human life they supplement rather
than displace or oppose each other.

The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice
or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the
laws, and the processes of nature. The even more impor-
tant task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the
consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.
Each of these two activities represents a deep and vital
function of the soul of man, and both are necessary for the
life, the progress, and the happiness of the human race.

It is a sublime conception of God which is furnished by
science, and one wholly consonant with the highest ideals
of religion, when it represents Him as revealing Himself
through countless ages in the development of the earth
as an abode for man and in the age-long inbreathing of
life into its constitutent matter, culminating in man with
his spiritual nature and all his Godlike powers.

This statement was signed by a number of the fore-
most scientists, religious leaders, and men of affairs of

A CONFLICT OF DOGMATISTS 241

the United States, whose names appear on pages 244-
461—a representative group of prominent men.

No one can question either the ability or the sincer-
ity of such men as these, and since their adhesion to
the declaration is purely voluntary it is evident that
they find no essential incompatibility between a per-
sonal religious faith and a scientific view of the uni-
verse. The list of signers could be extended indefi-
nitely; in fact, the statement probably represents in
general the position of most of the educated and mod-
erate-minded men of our time and country.

It is a curious feature of the present situation that
the laity are more alarmed over the advances of science
than the clergy. That is, those who know the most
about theology and who have most at stake in the
church are most willing to welcome historical criticism
and scientific research. ‘The real conflict is not be-
tween science and religion as such, but rather between
dogmatic and intolerant religionists and scientists on
the one side and liberal and tolerant religionists and
scientists on the other side. It is more a difference of
temperament than of opinion. The effort to fetter
freedom of investigation or to force thought into fixed
formulas is equally fatal in science and religion.

Overmuch fear of heresy indicates lack of faith.
Scientific men have such absolute confidence in the
validity of the scientific method that they permit their
most fundamental principles to be challenged even in
their own societies. Chemists listen without a shudder
to destructive attacks upon the immutability of the
elements and the indivisibility of the atom. The Royal
Society of London even applauds a speaker who sets an

242 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

upstart foreigner like Einstein above Newton, one of its
earliest and most venerated members.

The papers have reported a half-dozen cases of pro-
fessors who have been dismissed from educational in-
stitutions under ecclesiastical control for teaching evo-
lution, but there has been no retaliation from those
whom some call the ‘‘enemies of religion.”’ I have never
heard of the National Academy of Sciences expelling a
member because he was suspected of being a Presby-
terian or of the American Association for the Advance-
ment of Science blackballing a man because he had
been baptized. Girard College is the only institution
that excludes clergymen by charter and I understand
that the doorkeeper there is not very vigilant in search-
ing every visitor to see if he has a dogma concealed
about his person. If we begin to rewrite our textbooks
in science to suit a single sect, or section of a sect, we
may soon have Methodist and Baptist zodlogies, Prot-
estant and Catholic chemistries, Jewish and Christian
theories of gravitation, as we now have northern and
southern histories, and proletarian and capitalistic
economics.

What I have said here is not for the purpose of ad-
vocating or explaining evolution, or to show its relation
to religious thought. There are plenty of books on such
subjects. But I want to urge Christian thinkers to de-
vote more attention to this, as well as to other scientific
theories, in order to determine their theological bear-
ing and ethical application. Some clergymen denounce
evolution at sight as a dangerous novelty, which is
foolish. Others accept it docilely and indifferently, as
they do Newton’s laws of gravitation or the nebular

APPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTION 243

hypothesis—‘‘doubtless it is true since the scientists say
so, but it is none of my business’”—which is almost
equally foolish. For, as I have tried to show, it is very
much their business, although they are not qualified to
take an active part in its experimental verification and
development. The doctrine of evolution is capable of
very pernicious perversions both in theory and in prac-
tice, as the world has seen. It has been adduced as
justification of the claim that “Might is right.” The
“survival of the fittest” has been interpreted as the
“survival of the fightest.”

But we may draw from it lessons more consonant
with Christian ideals and ethics, as Tennyson did in
the days when Darwinism was young and viewed with
much aversion:

The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man,
And the man said, “Am I your debtor?”

And the Lord—‘“Not yet: but make it as clean as you can,
And then I will let you a better.”

If my body come from brutes, tho’ somewhat finer than
their own,
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the royal voice
be mute?
No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne,
Hold the scepter, Human Soul, and rule thy province of
the brute.

244 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

SIGNERS OF THE JOINT STATEMENT UPON THE RELATIONS OF
SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Religious Leaders

Dr. John D. Davis, Presbyterian, Professor Old Testament
Literature, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Bishop William Lawrence, Episcopalian, Boston.

Bishop William Thomas Manning, Episcopalian, New York.

Dr. Henry van Dyke, Presbyterian, preacher and poet,
Princeton, N. J.

Dr. James I. Vance, Presbyterian, First Presbyterian
Church, Nashville, Tenn.

President Clarence A. Barbour, Baptist, Rochester Theo-
logical Seminary.

President Ernest D. Burton, Baptist, University of Chi-
cago.

President Henry Churchill King, Congregationalist, Ober-
lin Coliege.

Dr. Robert E. Brown, Congregationalist, Second Congre-
gational Church, Waterbury, Conn.

Bishop Francis John McConnell, Methodist, Pittsburgh,
Pat

Dr. Peter Ainslie, Disciple, Christian Temple, Baltimore,
Md.

President William Louis Poteat, Baptist, Wake Forest Col-
lege, N. ‘Car,

Bishop Joseph H. Johnson, Episcopalian, Los Angeles,
Calif.

President James Gore King McClure, Presbyterian, Mc-
Cormick Theological Seminary, Chicago.

Dr. Merle N. Smith, Methodist, First Methodist Church,
Pasadena, California.

Dr. Herbert L. Willett, Disciple, Theologian, Associate
Editor Christian Century, Chicago.

Scientists

Charles D. Walcott, geologist, President of the National
Academy of Sciences, President of the American Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science, and Head of the
Smithsonian Institution of Washington.

WHAT SCIENTISTS SAY 245

Henry Fairfield Osborn, paleontologist, President of the
American Museum of Natural History, New York.

Edwin Grant Conklin, zoologist, Head of the Department
of Zoology, Princeton University.

James Rowland Angell, psychologist, President of Yale
University.

John Merle Coulter, Head of the Department of Botany,
University of Chicago.

Michael I. Pupin, physicist and engineer, Professor of
Electro-mechanics, Columbia University.

William James Mayo, surgeon, Mayo Foundation for
Medical Education and Research, Rochester, Minn.

George David Birkhoff, Head of the Department of
Mathematics, Harvard University.

Arthur A. Noyes, chemist, Director of the Gates Chemical
Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
Calif.

William Wallace Campbell, astronomer, Director of Lick
Observatory and President of the University of California.

John J. Carty, engineer, Vice-President in Charge of
Research, American Telephone and Telegraph Company,
New York.

Robert A. Millikan, physicist, Director of Norman Bridge
Laboratory of Physics, Pasadena, Calif.

William Henry Welch, pathologist, Director of the School
of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore.

John C. Merriam, paleontologist, President of the Carnegie
Institution, Washington, D.C.

Gano Dunn, engineer, Chairman of the National Research
Council, Washington, D.C.

Men of Affairs

William Allen White, editor, Emporia Gazette, Emporia,
Kans,

Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, Washington.

James John Davis, Secretary of Labor, Washington, D.C.

David F. Houston, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, New
York.

Frank O. Lowden, ex-Governor of Illinois, Oregon, IIl.

John Sharp Williams, ex-United States Senator, Yazoo
City, Miss,

246 THE ETHICS OF EVOLUTION

Rear Admiral William S. Sims, Commander United States
Naval Forces in European waters during the World War,
Newport, R.I.

Harry Bates Thayer, President, American Telephone and
Telegraph Co., New York.

Julius Kruttschnitt, Chairman of the Executive Commit-
tee, Southern Pacific Railway, New York.

Frank Vanderlip, ex-President National City Bank of
New York, Scarborough, N.Y.

Henry S. Pritchett, President Carnegie Foundation for
Advancement of Teaching, New York. |

Victor F. Lawson, publisher, Chicago Daily News, Chi-

cago. |

John G. Shedd, ex-President Marshall Field & Co., Chi-
cago.

Elihu Root, ex-Secretary of State, New York.

A SERMON WITHOUT TEXT, OR MORAL

THERE are a great many things about the ministry
that puzzle a layman. One is the very small amount
of the Bible which is utilized for homiletic purposes.
It might be supposed that in listening to sermons at the
rate of a hundred a year a man would in the course of a
lifetime hear the most of the available portion of the
Bible treated didactically; but this is not the case. In
reading the Bible one is always striking verses which
seem to him, in his unprofessional ignorance, well
adapted for texts but which he cannot recall having
heard sermons upon, and he wishes his minister would
put a slot-box in the vestry into which the congregation
could drop the texts they want to hear discussed.

For example, a great deal of attention is now being
paid to questions of political economy in the pulpit, so
much that if all we knew of the Bible was what we
get from some of our modern preachers we would sup-
pose it to be purely a treatise on that subject; yet there
is one excellent text for sermons of this class which
seems to be neglected. I allude to the last clause of
the fourteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel
of Luke, “Be content with your wages.”

We all know the occasion for the admonition. The
Roman soldiers did a great deal for civilization. They
were the cement which held together the most stable
and extensive of the ancient empires. They maintained

order among a hundred nations and enforced peace for
247

248 A SERMON WITHOUT TEXT OR MORAL

the first time on rival sects and castes. They gave a
new meaning to the conception of law. They estab-
lished some degree of justice where the caprice of
despots had been the only power. But “single men
in barracks don’t grow to plaster saints.” They had
their faults and John kodaked them as accurately as
he did the Pharisees, the publicans and the multitude.
They did, as he said, sometimes take advantage of their
position of public police to accuse men falsely, they
were often brutal and rough in their treatment of the
subject populace and they were given to striking for
higher wages.

What strikers they were, when you think of it! They
struck for less work and more holidays; they struck for
more spoils of war and less weight to carry. They
struck because the weather was too hot and they struck
because the water was too cold. They struck when-
ever a popular leader was removed, and if no other
excuse presented itself they struck for recognition of
the legion. And when new legions were formed with
recruits from the recently annexed portions of the
empire they struck against the admissions of “barbar-
ians,” a word that meant the same as “‘scabs” does now.
In every great emergency, in any crisis when it was
particularly necessary that all classes should work to-
gether for the common good, the legions could be de-
pended upon to strike for higher wages. The election
of an emperor was their great chance, and finally it
came to be recognized that the man who promised most
to the soldiers would be emperor. Politicians catered
to the legion vote. That is why Rome fell. There
are fifty-six other reasons why Rome fell, for which

i

UNPOPULAR GOSPEL 249

see commencement orations, but they are for use with
other subjects.

Some possible reasons occur to me why ministers do
not preach from the text “Be content with your wages.”
One is that it may not be applicable to the present time.
If so, it is a good reason. Preachers no longer use the
biblical denunciations against the worship of graven
images and ceremonial pollutions because these are not
modern vices. It may be that there are now no people
discontented with their wages, that all employers pay
as much as they can afford, that every employee realizes
that he is getting as much as he deserves and that the
world has become so far Christianized that we can
delight to see others prosper more than ourselves. It
may be that there is now no class which strives to
advance its private interests regardless of the incon-
venience and injury to the public that may come from
the means they employ. If, then, there are none who
attempt to get better wages by violence or false accusa-
tion, the clergy are right in treating the text as obsolete.

There is another possible explanation why this text
is not used—and I must confess that this is not original
but was suggested to me by a minister. I really never
should have thought of it myself. It is that preaching
from such texts would “alienate the masses.” This is
certainly a great objection. In fact it is insuperable.
It has always been the great obstacle to the spread of
Christianity that preaching the gospel has a tendency
to “alienate the masses.” It is perhaps not too much to
say that if it had not been for this all the world would
have been Christian long ago. It must be extremely
difficult for a pastor of a mixed congregation to preach

250 A SERMON WITHOUT TEXT OR MORAL

“the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”
and not “alienate” somebody. I do not see how he can
do it. And the masses, above all. There are only a
few preachers who have millionaires in their congrega-
tions, so rich men are fair game. You can learn all
about their vices in the newspapers and there are lots
of good texts in the Bible to use against rich men, more
than any preacher can use up in a lifetime; but if he
alienated the masses the church would be empty and his
sphere of usefulness curtailed. I see that.

Perhaps John thought that their wages were high
enough. But their regular pay was only about ten cents
a day and often they did not get that because of graft
by the men higher up. It would be unwise to establish
this as the maximum wage on scriptural authority.

Another reason why this text is not used may be that
it is not considered inspired. But the most critical of
my commentators does not question it and the most
modern of my translators does not alter the sense of
the passage. It was spoken by the greatest prophet
ever born of woman, but that would not prevent its
being rejected by the highest critics. The “higher
critics” are those who throw out any passage which
they do not understand; the “highest critics” are those
who deny the inspiration of anything they do not like.
It is an easier method than that of the higher criticism,
does not require so much scholarship, and it is more
successful. It is really the only way to get a Bible
which is perfectly satisfactory to oneself and the con-
gregation. Inspiration is of course not confined to the
past. We are all of us infallible, more or less, and
“they didn’t know everything down in Judee.” Some

a ee ee ee

IS DISCONTENT A DUTY? 251

ministers go so far as to preach the virtue of “divine
discontent.” Discontent does seem a queer attribute
for the Deity, but probably it is all right. Only if con-
tentment is no longer one of the Christian virtues, let
us know it at once and we will stop our feeble and pain-
ful efforts to cultivate it.

EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

Unless, in using the gift of “tongues” you utter intelligible words,
how can what you say be understood? You will be speaking to the
winds! There is, for instance, a certain number of different lan-
guages in the world, and not one of them fails to convey meaning.
If, however, 1 do not happen to know the language, I shall be a
foreigner to those who speak it, and they will be foreigners to
me,... Therefore let him who, when speaking, uses the gift of
“tongues” pray for ability to interpret them—1 Corinthians 14: 9-11,
13 (Twentieth Century Version).

Not long ago I had to change trains at a junction
and found that I had run out of reading matter for
the long journey before me. There were only five min-
utes between trains and I had no time to choose accord-
ing to my taste. So I decided to take as my guide the
voice of the people, and making a dash at the news-
stand I asked the dealer: “‘Where is your shelf of best
sellers?” He pointed to a row of new books and there
I saw among the detective stories and jazz novels three
books of another sort: Papini’s Life of Christ, Van
Loon’s Story of the Bible, and Goodspeed’s modern
English version of the New Testament.

Now what was there in common between the brilliant
and uncritical picture of Christ by an Italian ex-atheist,
the colloquial and modernistic narration of biblical
stories by an American journalist, and the scholarly
and literal translation of a theological professor that
should place these three rather expensive volumes

among the best sellers of the day? Simply that all
202

UNDERSTANDED OF THE PEOPLE = 253

three were in their several ways fresh and unconven-
tional presentations of the Bible. Their popularity
showed that the people of today will read the Scriptures
if they are translated into the language of today. The
Bible is perpetually among the best sellers but only
when it is put into a new and modern form does it at-
tract the attention of the general reader.

There are two classes of people who will be benefited
by a modern English translation of the Bible: those
who are familiar with the present version and those who
are not. As we cease to hear the ticking of a clock
after listening a while, so those who have heard, read,
or memorized portions of the Scriptures every day since
babyhood, and always in the same words, have lost the
power of perceiving their deep and vivid meaning. On
the other hand, to those who have not been so trained
the biblical language seems strange, quaint, and af-
fected, and it is difficult to persuade them that anything
which sounds so foreign and antiquated can be of prac-
tical value to them.

To older Christians any change in the phrases which
have been their comfort in sorrow and the expression
of their deepest emotion gives a shock like the singing
of a hymn to an unaccustomed tune, but a new genera-
tion is continually coming on, and it is a question
whether we shall train them in an acquired taste for
the ancient phraseology and so fix a gulf between their
religious and their daily life or give them the Gospel in
their own language. We do not nowadays need so
much a greater attachment and reverence for estab-
lished words and forms as we do a fresh presentation
of the message of God to the modern world. There is

254 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

not such a change in the English of the last three hun-
dred years as to make any considerable portion of our
Bible absolutely unintelligible to the ordinary reader.
There are not many passages in the Authorized Ver-
sion which seriously distort the sense, and with the
abundance of dictionaries, no one need be misled by
these. But tone and style are just as important factors
in a translation as verbal accuracy, and in this respect
the Revised Version is no improvement over the old.
The chief fault with the Authorized Version was not
that it was inaccurate, but that it was antiquated, and
the Revised Version is much the same.

Difficult as the art of translating is, its aim is very
simple. It is, to produce on the readers of another
language the same impression as was produced on the
readers of the original. The Bible as a message to our
own times is of greater importance than it is as an
English classic. Paul did not write in the Greek of
Homer, and we should not translate him in the English
of Shakespeare. Paul’s Greek was to his contem-
poraries about what good newspaper English is to us.
It is brisk, everyday language; not overburdened by
grammatical scrupulosity; not in the least quaint,
archaic, or affected. Doubtless some of Paul’s vigor-
ous and unconventional phrases borrowed from the
shops, the barracks, and the prize ring shocked the
literary sensibilities of the précieuses of Corinth.

What is wanted in any translation of an ancient
work, as also in a historical novel, is not the effect of
antiquity, but of contemporaneity. The object of read-
ing such a work is to be transported back to the age
which it depicts, and any affectation of the archaic de-

ANTIQUE FINISH 255

stroys the illusion, because no age appears antiquated
or peculiar to itself. To publish nowadays a new or a
revised version in the language of King James is mor-
ally and esthetically allied to the practice of filling the
grain of oak furniture with lampblack to give an “an-
tique finish.”’ It is like translating a German novel into
broken English to give it a foreign flavor.

A large part of a Dictionary of the Bible is taken
up with explaining the meaning of the English words
used in our common version—that is, in translating
the translation. This is a very valuable feature of the
dictionary—the pity of it is that something essentially
so unnecessary should be so much needed. A new
translation has the further advantage of getting rid of
theological phraseology. Every word in the Authorized
Version is weighted down with a pile of scholastic
tomes. We are forced to read the gospel message
through spectacles dim with the mists of eighteen cen-
turies of commentation and controversy. This is like
the practice that used to prevail in the schools of study-
ing Greek from Latin textbooks.

But we need not discuss the question whether seven-
teenth-century English represents ancient Greek bet-
ter than does twentieth-century English. The use of
the second person singular and of obsolete words and
idioms may give an agreeable literary flavor to the
educated taste, but that does not decide the matter.
What we want to know is whether the average man,
woman, and child will get by using them a fresher and
more vivid realization of the meaning of the message
of the Bible to them. We are not obliged to decide from
theoretical grounds alone, for the experiment is easily

256 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

tried. There are several translations of the New Testa-
ment in modern English on the market; I have seen
them tested under widely different circumstances, and
they were always received with a hearty welcome and
no opposition. Students at the university, prisoners in
the penitentiary, and the ordinary church congrega-
tions are alike more interested and impressed than when
the ordinary version is used. It is a strange sight to
look down from the pulpit and see the congregation
really listening to the customary reading of the lesson.
But most marked of all are the results of its use with
the young people’s societies. To have boys and girls
beg the leader to read longer to them in the New Testa-
ment, to have them borrow it from each other, and sit
up nights to read it through like the latest novel, is suffi-
ciently unusual to merit attention.

The more new translations the better. The im-
portant thing is to keep any one of them from becoming
“authorized.” In the multiplicity of sects there is a
chance for the true Christianity to develop. In the
multiplicity of versions there is a chance for freedom
from the bondage to the letter. When each scholar in
the Bible class has a different version there will not be
so many hours wasted in quibbling over the technical
meaning of some English words. They will be obliged
to study the thought. Many persons who do not read
the original tongues find it advantageous to read the
Bible in French or German, not because these versions
are better than ours, though they are because less anti-
quated, but because they get a better insight into the
meaning through the unaccustomed words.

Paul’s letters in particular show a gain in vividness

A DRIVE FOR THE FUND 257

and modernity, as the following passage from the
Twentieth Century New Testament will show:

I wish you would tolerate a little folly in me!—as indeed
you really do. I am jealous over you with a jealousy like
the jealousy of God. I gave you in marriage to one hus-
band, that I might bring into the Christ’s presence a pure
bride. Yet J fear that it may turn out that, just as the
Serpent by his craftiness deceived Eve, so your minds may
have lost the loyalty and purity due from you to the Christ.
For if some newcomer is proclaiming a Jesus other than the
one whom we proclaimed, or if you are receiving a Spirit
different from the one which you did receive, or a Good
News different from that which you welcomed, then you are
marvelously tolerant! I do not reckon myself in any way
inferior to the most eminent apostles! Though I am not a
trained orator, yet I am not deficient in knowledge; indeed,
we made this perfectly plain to you in everything.

With reference, indeed, to the Fund for your fellow-
Christians, it is really superfluous for me to say anything
to you. I know, of course, of your willingness to help,
and am always boasting of it, when speaking about you to
the Macedonians. I tell them that you in Greece have
been ready for a year past. It was really your zeal that
stimulated most of them. My reason for sending our
Brothers is to prevent what we said about you proving in
this particular matter an empty boast, and to enable you
to be as well prepared as I have been saying you are.
Otherwise, if any Macedonians were to come with me and
find you unprepared, we-—to say nothing of you—should
feel ashamed of our present confidence.

A living faith must be expressed in living language.
The chief foe of vital religion is antiquarianism. An

258 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

old and neglected city becomes buried under the accu-
mulated débris of the passing years. In the course of
time it becomes hidden from view and forgotten, al-
though there may still linger about the site some dim
tradition of its historic greatness. But when the skilled
archeologist excavates the mound, carefully removing
the encumbering dirt layer by layer, and religiously re-
storing the buildings and preserving the utensils of
daily life, there stands revealed to us the original city,
not as a ruin and a relic, but as the abode of life; and
for the first time we get a feeling of kinship and under-
standing for the ancient people who once trod its
streets and worshiped in its temples, who met the same
temptations and struggled with the same sins as we.

So it is with an old book which through neglect or
misplaced reverence has become encumbered and ob-
scured by the accumulation of obsolete expressions. It,
too, has to be dug out and restored before it can seem
real and lifelike to us again, before we can see it as it
was in the beginning. For many books this does not
matter. Let them get dusty and moldy as they will.
Once in a long while we will take down the venerable
volume from the shelf and spend a few minutes turn-
ing over its yellow pages. We find a certain pleasure in
puzzling out the meaning from its antiquated spelling
and strange phraseology. We are amused at recogniz-
ing familiar thoughts disguised in these ‘‘olde cloathes,”
but we may be sure that this was not the impression
that the author intended to convey. The vellum volume
contains perhaps the pamphlets of some pugnacious
politician or the sermons of a protesting divine, a mod-
ernist of the modernists of his time, and he would rather

THE GOSPEL OF KING JAMES 259

never be read at all than be regarded as a quaint relic
of antiquity. It really is not treating him fairly to
read him in this spirit, and he has the right to resent
it.

The books that most need translation are those sev-
eral centuries old in what is nominally our own lan-
guage but which is really quite different. The words
seem the same and the modern reader assumes that they
mean to him what they meant to contemporaries,
whereas many of them have suffered a subtle alteration
in essence or in atmosphere through the lapse of time.
If a man does not know a word of Greek he does not
venture to interpret the meaning of a passage in the
Greek classics. But when he reads the authorized ver-
sion of the Bible he may be unconsciously misled as to
the meaning of the language, and he may stake his
soul’s salvation or may condemn a brother as a heretic,
on the basis of a single text of which he no more under-
stands the meaning than he does of the original Greek
or Hebrew.

Only experts in Elizabethan English can understand
Shakespeare, and they do not agree about it. The
Variorum edition devotes pages to the interpretation by
different commentators of a single word, and often in
the end they give it up as incomprehensible. Such
critical speculations form an interesting intellectual
exercise, but it really does not matter after all what
Shakespeare meant by any obscure word or passage.
Nobody holds Shakespeare to be divinely inspired in
the theological sense, and nobody takes the plays as an
infallible rule of faith and practice, so the reader is
none the worse if he has misconstrued a phrase or two.

260 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

For instance, Shakespearean scholars tell us that the
common quotation, “Conscience does make cowards of
us all,” does not mean what it is commonly quoted to
mean. But who cares? It’s a handy quotation any-
how, whatever the author may have meant by it. So
too Biblical scholars tell us that the oft cited saying of
Job:

For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall
stand at the latter day upon the earth.

And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet
in my flesh shall I see God,

should rather be read in this way:

“Still, I know One to champion me at last, to stand up
for me upon earth,

This body may break up, but even then my life shall have
a sight of God,” ?

or this:

“But as for me I know that my Vindicator liveth,
And at last He will stand up upon the earth:
And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed,
Then without my flesh shall I see God.” ?

This remains an inspiring and inspired passage, how-
ever it may be worded, but obviously it is not right to
use it as a “proof-text’”’ for three such serious dogmas
as the redemptive function of Christ, the resurrection

1 Moffatt’s translation.
2 Aked’s The Divine Drama of Job.

LIVING CLASSICS 261

of the body, and second advent. The only cure for the
literalism and verbalism which strangles the life out
of religion is the multiplicity of versions. ‘For the
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”

The classicists are beginning to realize the value of
real translations that carry the spirit as well as the sense
of the original. Many such have recently appeared that
enable those of us who neglected the ancient languages
in our youth to see for the first time something of what
our classical friends are so enthusiastic about. The
Loeb Library has opened up a new world to me, the
world of Greek and Roman life. I have read most of
the volumes halfway through, for I read them with
eyes to the right. In this series as a rule the colloquial
passages are rendered into colloquial English with little
affectation of the archaic. I have all my life been a
devoted reader, however delinquent a follower, of
Marcus Aurelius as revealed in his Meditations. But I
got better acquainted with the man himself when I read
his letters to his teacher, Fronto, and found that he was
not afraid to use slang and puns on occasion. For
instance,

In future be chary of telling so many fibs, especially in
the Senate, about me. This speech of yours is awfully °
well written. Oh, if I could only kiss your head for every
heading of it! You have absolutely put every one else in
the background.

This reads like one of Roosevelt’s letters to Lodge, and
it should.

8 Horribiliter.

262 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

The worst enemies of the Bible are those who regard
it as “mere literature.” They hold the King James
version sacred because they have ceased to hold the
original sacred. I clip a typical comment from a cur-
rent editorial:

It is as ridiculous to translate the King James version
into colloquial English as it would be to play the same
trick with Hamlet or with Milton’s Areopagitica. The
authorized Bible as it now stands is a piece of unexcelled
literary workmanship. Leaving out of consideration alto-
gether its religious import it has the charm of a magnificent
style, which should not be tampered with.

“Leaving out of consideration altogether its religious
import”—exactly, that is just what such people do.
The editor is so ignorant of what he was writing about
that he does not know that the King James version was
written in colloquial English and that the New Testa-
ment was written in colloquial Greek. He thinks it was
written in blank verse like Hamlet or in stately Latin-
ized prose like the Areopagitica, which in itself shows
how misleading the King James version has become.

As a matter of fact our Authorized Version dates
rather from 1535 than 1611, for “‘it is not too much to
say that William Tyndale wrote nine-tenths of the King
James New Testament.” * And what Tyndale intended
to we can best learn from his own words in reply to one
of his opponents: “If God spare my lyfe, ere many
years I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough shall

know more of the scripture than thou dost.”’ He says

4 Goodspeed’s The Making of the English New Testament, p. 51.

THE PLOWBOY’S BIBLE 263

that he “perceaved by experyence how that it was im-
possible to stablysh the laye people in any truth,
excepte the scripture were playnly layde before their
eyes in their mother tongue’”—“‘which thinge onlye,”
he adds, “moved me to translate the New Testament.” °

Tyndale was a learned man, M.A. of Oxford and P.G.
of Cambridge, and he could have written in the style of
Euphues if he had wanted to, but he deliberately re-
jected all pedantry and affectation in order that he
might lay the Scriptures before the eyes of the lay
people in their mother tongue. Luther had the same
aim, and when he was translating the Bible into German
he went down into the market place so that he might
catch the racy vernacular of the day. The result was
that these versions became the literary masterpieces
and models of the English and German languages.

Of course Tyndale’s translation met with heated op-
position, as does every effort to bring the Bible to the
people. But even today I doubt if any of the opponents
of contemporary versions can handle the vocabulary of
abuse with such splendid vigor as did Cochleus in
attacking Tyndale:

The New Testament translated into the vulgar tongue is
in truth the food of death, the fuel of sin, the veil of malice,
the pretext of false liberty, the protection of disobedience,
the corruption of discipline, the depravity of morals, the
termination of concord, the death of honesty, the well-
spring of vices, the disease of virtues, the instigation of
rebellion, the milk of pride, the nourishment of contempt,

5 Goodspeed, p. 4. If we really want the antiquated flavor we
must preserve the original spelling.

264 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

the death of peace, the destruction of charity, the enemy
of unity, the murderer of truth.®

And the funny thing about it is that the version that
Cochleus was fighting for, the Vulgate, was itself a
translation into the vulgar tongue, Latin, and when
Jerome produced it in the fourth century “it was ve-
hemently attacked as an unwarrantable innovation,
even by a man like Augustine.” Intolerance and con-
servatism are the same in all ages. It is a reaction that
can always be relied upon, whatever else changes. Not
many years ago, when an attempt was made to trans-
late the New Testament into modern Greek, a riot was
precipitated in Athens, in which people were killed.

In India, during the Sena dynasty of the eleventh
century, the Buddhists, who were the heretics of that
age, introduced the vernacular into religion, but the
Brahmans opposed it with this ringing declaration:

Who hears the eighteen Puranas or the Ramayana in
Bengali will be thrown into the hell called Rourava.

I do not know what are the heating facilities of the hell
called Rourava, but I presume it is not hot enough to
satisfy our present-day Brahmans who adhere to the
King James version on the ground that “the language
Paul and Moses spoke is good enough for me.”

The need for new versions is apparent when we learn
that the Greek text that Tyndale translated was that
compiled by Erasmus in 1516 from five fragmentary
manuscripts of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.

6 Goodspeed, p. 8.

THE TWO-HORNED UNICORN 265

Now scholars have at their disposal 150 manuscripts
dating from the third to the ninth centuries. As Pro-
fessor Goodspeed says: “We now possess a Greek
Testament under every word of which there goes down
a foundation of manuscript evidence fifteen hundred
years deep into the past.” More than that, we know
for the first time the language of the New Testament,
for the recent discovery in Egypt of a mass of Greek
letters on papyrus proves that it was written in the ver-
nacular of the time, which was very different from the
literary style.‘

The British scholars who spent ten years, 1870-80, in
revising the New Testament adopted as their first
principle “to introduce as few alterations as possible
into the text of the Authorized Version consistently with
faithfulness.” The American revisers who published
their version in 1901 were less conservative but still
regarded it as “no part of our task to modernize the
diction of the Bible.” Yet they cleared up many ob-
scure and misleading passages that had perplexed the
devout and alienated the skeptical. Two mythical
monsters were removed from the zodlogy of the Old
Testament. The dragons that howled in waste places
are converted into jackals, and the unicorns into wild
oxen. The two-horned unicorn * involved a verbal con-
tradiction that strained the faith of the literalist who
held to the infallibility of the Authorized Version. Pas-
sages like Jeremiah 4 :19 and Lamentations 1 :20 were,

7 For a popular account of the discovery of the letters of the time
of Christ, showing that the Epistles and Gospels were written in
the vulgar tongue, see Saturday Evening Post, May 30, 1925.

8 Of Deuteronomy 33:17.

266 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

as the American revisers say, “both unpleasant and in-
correct.”

With the question of biblical phraseology is involved
that of the language of prayer. To speak the English of
the seventeenth century as fluently and as carelessly as
one’s mother tongue requires constant training from
childhood. Every one who has had experience with the
devotional services of young people knows that one
reason why it is so hard to induce them to offer public
prayer is that they-must speak in what is practically a
foreign tongue. They have never used the second
person singular, and they often blunder in trying to
convert a modern verb into the ancient form, exciting
the risibilities of the frivolous and experiencing
a feeling of embarrassment quite out of propor-
tion to the insignificance of the mistake. They
are only safe when using the familiar language of the
Bible, so the ordinary public prayer consists largely
of a more or less skillful collocation of Scriptural
phrases representing very imperfectly the real feelings
and aspirations of the speaker. The only advantage
which extemporary prayer has over written is thus
sacrificed, and what should be the simplest and most
spontaneous expression of heartfelt emotions becomes a
troublesome literary exercise. It would be interesting
to know how many people in private prayer adopt these
forms and how many use their natural language. My
own opinion is that many Christians in their most
earnest private devotions drop all obsolete idioms and
grammatical constructions. If that is so, there would
seem to be no good reason for assuming them in public,
for there is no ground for thinking that the Lord takes

THOU OR YOU 267

special delight in an address couched in antiquated
phraseology.

Many evangelistic and Salvation Army songs mix
“thee” and “you” in the same sentence in a way which
is very amusing from a literary standpoint but, con-
sidered further, is encouraging, as it shows the struggles
of common sense breaking through conventionality, and
proves that living religion cannot be forever bound in
dead ecclesiastical forms. Let us have confidence in
our own religious feelings and in the possibility of ex-
pressing them in our own language. Let us believe in
ourselves and in the twentieth century. Suppose you
associated the word “ghost” only with a degrading
superstition. How would the phrase ‘Holy Ghost”
strike you? If your only idea of a king was something
akin to slavery, or polygamy, or feudalism, something
to be hated and overthrown, how would the monarchical
phraseology of the church impress you? What would
you think of a man who used “thou,” and “thee” and
“ve,” and could give no reason for doing so except that
it was done in 1611? In reading the Bible, would you
not be frequently like the Ethiopian eunuch, “reading
without understanding’’?

The custom of reading passages of Scripture in
schools is a good one for literary and religious reasons,
but for both reasons it is a serious mistake to prescribe
the use of the King James version alone when there are
more truthful versions to be had. Various versions
should be used in turn, or together, so the students may
turn their attention to the meaning and not fall into
the superstition of believing that there is something
magical in the repetition of certain archaic words and

268 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

phrases. How would a professor of chemistry or biol-
ogy like it if he were required to use a seventeenth
century textbook?

Oliver Wendell Holmes warns us of the danger of
“polarized” words, that is, language that has become so
familiar and fixed that it has lost its meaning and vivid-
ness:

Time only can gradually wean us from our Epeolatry, or
word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas of the thing sig-
nified. Man is an idolater, or symbol-worshiper, by na-
ture, which of course is no fault of his; but sooner or later
all his local and temporary symbols must be ground to
powder, like the golden calf,—word-images as well as
metal and wooden ones. Rough work, iconoclasm, but the
only way to get at truth.

Skepticism is afraid to trust in depolarized words and
so cries out against a new translation. I think, myself, if
every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its
old symbol and put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word,
we should have some chance at reading it as philosophers,
or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it—When society has once
fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it has never
done yet, it will perhaps crystallize it over again in new
forms of language.®

The primary purpose of the Protestant Reformation
was to put the Bible into the language of the common
people, but modern Protestants have so far forgotten
the fundamental principle of their faith that they are
content to hear from the pupit an antiquated and inac-
curate version of the Holy Scriptures. The pastor pur-

9 The Professor at the Breakfast Table.

THE TEST OF THE CHRISTIAN 269

ports to be reading the veritable revelation of God yet
knows in reading certain passages that the words do
not mean what they seem to mean, and the congregation
does not know what they mean at all.

All who value the truth above tradition, all who be-
lieve that the Bible is something more than mere litera-
ture, all who believe that the Bible has a message for
the world today which should be delivered directly and
correctly—in other words, all sincere Christians—will
prefer a modern version. All who worship words and
care not for their meaning, all whose religion consists
in verbal vesture, all who fear that the Bible will lose
its sanctity if presented in plain English, all who fear
that if the Bible is made readable it will be read and so
make religion a vital factor in modern life, all who hold
that the King James version is inerrant and gives the
literal language of the prophets and saints, all such will
naturally oppose the introduction of any new transla-
tion.

Religion of all things can least afford to be tainted
with antiquity. The greatest danger today is that our
young people, more impatient with the past than any
previous generation, shall look upon religion as some-
thing out of date with which they have no concern. If
religion is too closely identified with Palestine it will be
regarded as foreign to young Americans, except those
whose home land is the Promised Land. The God of
the churches is associated in the minds of modern
youth with mummies and cuneiform inscriptions,
rather than with the printing press and radio. ‘There
is some excuse for the good old Methodist lady who
started in to learn Hebrew. When asked why, she re-

270 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

plied that she must die before many years, and she
wanted to be able to talk to God in his own language
when she got to heaven.

We must not allow religion to be buried under a heap
of archeological rubbish like the cities of Mesopotamia
and Egypt. The Lord is no antiquary. He is a God of
the twentieth century, more at home, we believe, in our
modern world than in any previous age, though we
hope that the twenty-first will be still better fitted for
His habitation.

It were blasphemous to suppose that the truths of
religion would lose by translation into modern English.
Many a man, however, has been condemned as heretic
for expressing an old truth ina new form. I once heard
a devout woman criticize her pastor as irreverent, and
when I asked her how, she said: ‘‘He talks about Abra-
ham, Isaac, and Jacob as though they were real per-
sons.”

What the world needs is the reincarnation of the
Eternal Word in the living words of today.

REFERENCES TO MopeRN ENGLISH VERSIONS

If, as I hope, these remarks may have inclined some to
see for themselves if religion will survive translation into
our vernacular, it may be of interest to append the titles of
such modern versions as I am familiar with. I have pur-
posely quoted from various versions in preparing this volume
in order that the reader may sample several. No one who
did not know Italian would think of making a serious study
of Dante without consulting all the different translations
available, and it is quite as important to learn exactly what
the biblical writers said about Inferno and Paradise.

MODERN ENGLISH VERSIONS 271

The New Testament: An American Translation. By Edgar
J. Goodspeed, Professor of Biblical and Patristic Greek
in the University of Chicago, Chicago. The University
of Chicago Press.

This is the latest and probably the best for American
readers.

The Making of the English New Testament. By Egdar J.
Goodspeed, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

This is not a translation but a book about translations,
giving the reasons for a modern version.

The Twentieth Ceniury New Testament. New York: Flem-
ing H. Revell Co.

It was this book that converted me to modern versions.
I have used it ever since it first appeared, twenty-five
years ago, and I know how well it works on young and
old, learned and unlearned. It is translated by a group
of twenty British scholars of various denominations.

The Modern Bible. By the Rev. Frank Schell Ballentine.
New York: The Lovell Co.

The first attempt at a modern version translation of the
Bible, was the publication under this title of little volumes
of the gospels in 1899 by an Episcopalian clergyman.

The Modern Speech New Testament. By R. F. Weymouth,
Boston: The Pilgrim Press.

The Westminster Version of the Sacred Scriptures: The
New Testament. Edited by the Rev. Cuthbert Lattey,
Professor of Sacred Scriptures at St. Beuno’s College,
North Wales, and the Rev. Joseph Keating, Editor of
The Month. New York: Longmans, Green and Co.

A new translation by a group of Jesuit scholars with the
approval of the Cardinal Archbishop. The English is only
partially modernized.

The Old Testament (Vol. 1: Genesis to Esther; Vol. II: Job
to Malachi) and The New Testament. By the Rev. James
Moffatt, Professor of Church History, United Free
Sait College, Glasgow. New York: George H. Doran

O.

Here we have for the first time a complete and scholarly
translation of the whole Bible into modern English. No
one who believes that the Bible has a message for our
times and wants to know, so far as can be found out, what

272 EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

its authors meant should fail to consult it, even though he
may prefer the familiar language of the old version.

The Psalms in Modern Speech. By John Edgar McFadyen,
Professor of the Old Testament, United Free Church Col-
lege, Glasgow. Boston: The Pilgrim Press.

The poetical form is maintained by rhythmical language
and printing as verse.

The Beginnings of History According to the Jews. By
Professor Charles P. Fagnani, of Union Theological
Seminary. New York: Albert & Charles Boni.

An original and literal translation of the first eleven
chapters of Genesis.

Professor J. M. P. Smith with several collaborators is
preparing a modern English translation of the Old Testa-
ment that will soon be published by the University of
Chicago Press.

WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN
(A Missionary Talk to Young People)

Five times I have been given one less than forty lashes by the
Jews. I have been beaten three times by the Romans, I have been
stoned once, I have been shipwrecked three times, a night and a
day, I have been adrift at sea; with my frequent journeys, in
danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own
people, danger from the heathen, danger in the city, danger in the
desert, danger at sea, danger from false brothers, through toil and
hardship, through many a sleepless night, through hunger and
thirst, often without food, and exposed to cold—II Corinthians
11:24-27 (Goodspeed’s version).

PEOPLE often wonder what is the secret of the per-
sistent opposition to foreign missions; why it is that so
many otherwise good and intelligent persons object to
sharing with our brothers in darkness the light that has
been given to us, especially in consideration of the fact
that religion, like knowledge, is something that is not
diminished by dividing it but is multiplied. It is twice
blessed; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

The fact is, the root of the opposition to foreign mis-
sions is chiefly natural selfishness. We have a good
thing and we want to hold on to it. All men are by
nature monopolists. A poor man suddenly become
wealthy is likely to be as miserly as a born millionaire.
If a man has a fine painting, or a woman has a beauti-
ful dress, it is valued more highly if nobody else has
one like it.

It appears that some people think that Christ was
273

274 WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN

born to our race; that he came first to the Nordics and
afterwards to nobody. Actually of course we owe our
Christianity to foreign missions in the days when we
were the foreigners.

Our religious genealogy is this: Christ came as a
foreign missionary to the Jews, the Jews came to the
Romans, the Romans came to the English. The first
of these missionary enterprises we read about in the
Gospels; the second we read about in the Acts of the
Apostles. The third we do not read about at all as a
rule because it is not in the Bible. But that is a poor
reason. The history of the Church after the end of
Acts is also interesting and instructive. Let me tell you
a story or two from this unread history.

About the year 586 there lived in Rome a young
monk named Gregory. He had been born to high rank
and great wealth, but had laid both aside to serve the
church. It happened one day that Gregory visited the
slave market of the city. I say “happened,” but I do
not think it was altogether by chance, for when he
became pope he paid great attention to the evils of the
slave trade, and I presume that it was more from some
humanitarian motive than from mere idle curiosity that
he attended the slave sale.

There he saw every kind of man that the broad em-
pire of Rome could furnish; representatives of all the
conquered races, from the Nile to the North Sea, mostly
black, woolly-headed Africans and brown-skinned Asi-
atics with straight black hair. But among them there
happened to be that day three captives of quite unusual
racial type, with blue eyes, long flaxen hair hanging
down their backs, and pink and white complexion, a

THE PRIESTLY PUNSTER 275

type of physiognomy that has, very curiously, been
regarded even among brunette peoples as belonging to
angels. Gregory was so attracted by the strange beauty
of these youths that he inquired whether they were of
Christian or of pagan people.

“Pagan,” replied the Jewish slave dealer.

“Alas, that beings of such bright faces should be
slaves of the Prince of Darkness! What is their race?”

““Angles,”’ was the answer.

“They look like angels and should have a heavenly
inheritance,” said Gregory. “From what country do
they come?”

“Deira.”

“Deira. Right, for they shall be rescued de ira
(from the wrath of God) and receive the mercy of
Christ. How call you the king of that country?”

“Ella.”

“Then must Alleluia be sung in A®lla’s land,” said the
priestly punster.

From that day Gregory became a missionary crank.
In fact he was so fanatical that he started out himself
a few days later with a few monks to convert Britain;
but he was so much needed in Rome at the time that
the people clamored for his recall, and the Pope sent
horsemen after him. They caught up with him at the
end of the third day’s journey and found him resting
under a tree, reading a book and making puns. It was
his only vice.

For some twenty years thereafter he was kept busy
at church work, but he never forgot his intention of con-
verting the savages of that remote archipelago. In
596, after he became Pope, he sent word to Gaul that

276 WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN

part of the papal revenue should be spent in buying
Anglo-Saxon slaves of seventeen or eighteen to be
sent to Rome for education, that they might later
be made missionaries to their native land. But with-
out waiting for that he announced his intention of send-
ing a band of monks to evangelize the English.

We have no record, so far as I know, of what advice
his friends gave him when he proposed his unprece-
dented plan to them, but since human nature is much
the same in all ages we can easily guess what objections
were brought forward to dissuade him.

In the first place, that it was hard times. We should
be justified in assuming this on general principles, for
it has always been hard times, ever since Adam was
evicted from the Garden of Eden, and the times are
felt to be especially hard whenever a contribution for
missions is called for. But we do not have to guess
about it, for we have sufficient knowledge of the state of
affairs to feel safe in saying that it was just about as
hard times then and there as it has been anywhere
and any time in the history of the world. A commercial
crisis, a political crisis, and a religious crisis were in
conjunction at that time in the city of Rome. Half the
people were paupers, supported by public funds. The
old families had been living on the interest of their debts
for many years, and now many of them were being kept
alive by the alms of the church. Gregory himself gave
food to three thousand poor girls and their parents
every day. The Campagna around Rome, once so fruit-
ful, was now a desert. Crops had failed, malaria had
depopulated the land, and the farms had become cattle
ranges. The Lombards from the north of Italy were

HARD TIMES IN OLD ROME 277

threatening to overwhelm Rome at any time and could
only be kept off by a combination of force and diplo-
macy, arms and bribes. Plagues and floods were caus-
ing horrible devastation. All the money that could be
raised was needed right here in Rome.

Gregory himself thus paints the situation in one of
his sermons:

Everywhere we see tribulation, everywhere we hear lam-
entation. The cities are destroyed, the castles torn down,
the fields laid waste, the land made desolate. Villages are
empty, few inhabitants remain in the cities, and even these
poor remnants of humanity are daily being reduced.

Another argument was that there was work enough
to do at home. And indeed there was. A great many
of the Italians even among the churchmen needed con-
verting as much as any heathen. There was a schism in
the church, an old heresy and several new ones. John,
Patriarch of Constantinople, was setting himself to
be Pope. It was doubtless pointed out to Gregory that
he was already undertaking more than a dozen men
could do. He was teaching agriculture to the settlers
that he had put on the abandoned farms. He was trying
to reconcile the Arian heresy. He was acting as arbitra-
tor in the quarrels of the Lombards. He was reforming
the church music—introducing the Gregorian chants,
you know—and nothing takes more time, needs more
tact, and makes more trouble than managing a church
choir. He was having a hard fight within the church
to prevent the taking of bribes for ecclesiastical pre-
ferment. He was trying to abolish the slave trade, an

278 WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN

established institution of society for ten thousand years
or more, and not yet eliminated from the world. And
here he was proposing to undertake missions in the
foreign field. No wonder folks thought him foolish.
It is a well known fact that those who go in for foreign
missions never do anything for the home church. I
should say, rather, it is well known but not for that
reason to be taken for fact. Whether it is a fact or not
you can find out for yourself by observation in your
own church.

But probably the most powerful argument that
was brought against the new enterprise was that
the British were savages and incapable of Christianity.
Doubtless their own religion, crude as it might seem,
was better suited to their barbarous natures and primi-
tive stage of culture than the more refined and spiritual
Christianity. These tribes had never shown any sus-
ceptibility to civilization, and never had made a con-
tribution to the arts, literature, or science of the world.
Probably they were congenitally incapable of it.
They were destined to perish from the earth any-
way before the advance of civilization and it would be
mercy to leave them in peace.

It is almost impossible to realize the feeling of the
Greeks and Romans for outside barbarians. We cannot
nowadays in the light of history regard any people as
so hopeless as our ancestors seemed to the Romans.
Those far-off, foggy Tin Islands were in truth inhabited
by races about on a par with the American Indians,
lower than most of the races to which we now send mis-
sionaries. Some of them were painted blue with woad.
Their rcligion consisted in part of burning people alive

NORDIC PAGANS 279

in wicker cages, and in part of shocking rites under the
mistletoe of which we preserve the mere symbol. Even
the Anglo-Saxons, worshipers of Tiw, Woden, Thor,
and Friia, whom we commemorate in the name of four
days in the week Tiwsday, Wodensday, Thorsday, and
Friiasday had no higher idea of heaven than a place
where fighting could go on all day, and at night the
heroes, dead and alive, could all get drunk together.
Evidently Christianity could not do anything for such
folks. It would be wasted on them.

But, as I said, Gregory was a missionary crank and
none of these perfectly good arguments made any im-
pression on him. He sent off a party of monks under
Augustine to evangelize the British Isles. They got as
far as France when they heard such awful reports of the
savages that they were sent out to convert that they
turned back in despair. You can hear rather unfavor-
able things said even yet about the British from that
side of the Channel but in this case they were not
exaggerated. Augustine went back to Rome to beg
off, but Gregory persisted, and his forty monks, as
Gibbon said, conquered England more completely than
Ceesar’s six legions.

One by one and in various ways the seven kingdoms
of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy became Christianized,
and it was A.D. 601 before Gregory’s primary objective,
Deira, or Northumbria, was reached. King Aélla had
been dead for thirteen years and in his place reigned
Edwin, his son, Edwin of Edwin’s burgh, now called
Edinburgh. I have from childhood had a peculiar fond-
ness for King Edwin, perhaps because of his name, and
it has always seemed to me that he took the wisest con-

280 WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN

ceivable course under the circumstances. When Pau-
linus, the missionary, appeared at his court he neither
resented the intrusion nor accepted the new religion un-
critically. He did not murder the missionaries nor
demand miracles of them. He summoned a witenage-
mot, or council, and consulted the wisest of his kingdom
as to whether they should accept Christianity or cling
to the faith of their fathers. After some discussion
Coifi, the high priest of the established religion, arose
and declared that. the old gods were no good at all.
He had been a faithful and devout follower of them all
his life and it had not been of any benefit. The
old religion was mostly fraud, as none knew better than
he, its priest, and the new religion must be better since
it could not well be worse.

Then an old warrior rose, and said with savage elo-
quence that the life of man seemed to him like a bird
that flew out of the darkness into the king’s banquet
hall and, after circling around in bewilderment at the
light and noise of revelry, flew out of the opposite win-
dow into the night again. “Now,” he said, “if these
strangers can tell us anything of the unknown whence
we come or whither we go, or how to act for the little
while that we are in the light, by all means let them
come and teach us.” So the missionaries came and
taught, and that is how we became Christians.

Now the situation is reversed. The despised savages
of the Tin Islands and their Nordic neighbors have
become the dominant race of the world and the leaders
of civilization. The Anglo-Saxon people occupy or
control more than a quarter of the habitable area of the
earth. We are increasing in numbers, wealth, and

SENILE CIVILIZATIONS 281

power. We cannot say how long this unprecedented
prosperity will last, but we cannot assume that it will
last forever. Rotation in leadership seems to be the
rule of human history. Nations appear to have their
periods of youth, maturity, and old age, like individuals.

There is the moral of all human tales,

Tis but the same rehearsal of the past;
First freedom, and then glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last,

And history with all her volumes vast
Hath but one page.

We do not know the reason why peoples or persons
decline and die. Perhaps there is no reason why. Per-
haps they might live and flourish forever—but they
never do. Professor Flinders Petrie* of London Uni-
versity counts eight successive cycles of civilization, all
approximately the same length and, applying the same
measure to the present, looks for its collapse in about
three hundred years. Oswald Spengler of Germany °
using a different system of calculation, arrives at the
same date, 2200, for the definite decline of civilization
in Europe, which will finally be flooded by foreign and
fresher races. A nation is never really overthrown by
outsiders. It falls like a forest tree from dry rot in the
trunk. Even when a nation has not yet reached its
height certain signs of senility may be detected in it,
just as a man in the full prime of life and vigor may
sometimes perceive the first symptoms of the diseases
which he knows from his family history are most likely

1 Revolutions of Civilization.
2 Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

282 WHEN WE WERE HEATHEN

to cause his death. Professor Petrie enumerates as in-
dications of approaching national decline the accumu-
lation of wealth, the slackening of effort, the growth
of democracy, the demand of the majority for the
division of wealth, the overthrow of oligarchy, decrease
in production, and lapse into barbarism. Others have
suggested such symptoms as the following: increase in
suicides as showing failing courage or lack of love for
life; increase in the proportion of insane and feeble-
minded and in the prevalence of neurasthenia; decrease
in the birth rate, especially of the better stocks; in-
crease in homicide and crimes of violence; decline in in-
dividual initiative and increasing dependence upon gov-
ernment; extravagance in luxury; excessive devotion
to athletic spectacles; failure of family life; decline of
religion as a vital factor in individual life (though there
may be an increase in ecclesiastical power and pomp);
recrudescence of superstition; lack of coordination and
disregard for law.

These are some of the common, characteristic devel-
opments that have been observed in periods of national
decline, but which of them are significant symptoms,
and whether they are real causes or accidental accom-
paniments of senescence, has not yet been ascertained.
The diagnosis of disease in a nation is more difficult
than in an individual. Racial therapeutics is an un-
known science. Personally, I have as little confidence
in the predictions of the date of the death of our civi-
lization by Petrie and Spengler as I have in the prophe-
cies of the date of the end of the world deduced from
Daniel and Revelations. No man knows when or how
his end will come, and no nation knows either. But

THE COMING RACE 283

both may expect that it will come somehow and some-
time, and both should make preparations accordingly.

Now in every shift of supremacy from one race to
another there is always a great loss in the higher
achievements of civilization. Sometimes there is a
complete relapse into barbarism for centuries and great
cities become deserted ruins. The Sumerian, Hittite,
and Minoan civilizations had been completely forgotten
until recently unearthed by the archeologist. After
Rome ceased to be productive there were more than a
thousand years when almost nothing of importance was
contributed to science, art, or literature, and much that
had been known was forgotten and had to be redis-
covered. If it had not been for the missionary efforts
of such men as Paul, Gregory, Augustine and Pauline,
Christianity would have been lost in the wreck of Rome,
as was Latin learning and literature.

We cannot know, any more than did the Romans,
what people will be our successors in the age to come.
They may be yellow, brown, or black. They may be
some inconspicuous branch of the white race, or more
likely some hybrid that has not yet arisen. We can
only do the best we can by sharing with other peoples
the best we know, by teaching them what we have
found out about the laws of nature and about the laws
of God. Our religion was the best thing we inherited
from ancient Rome. It is the best thing we have to
give to others. We can be certain to Christianize our
successors if we Christianize the world. We have
simply to follow the Golden Rule. Do unto others as
others have done unto us. “Freely ye have received,
freely give.”

LEST WE FORGET
(A Fourth of July Sermon)

The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a
goodly heritage—Psalm 16:6.

WE celebrate Independence Day for the same reason
that we tie a knot in our handkerchief or slip a rubber
band on our finger. It is to remind us to remember
not to forget something. And the thing that we are
so likely to forget that we have to set aside a special
day to remember it in, is the biggest thing that belongs
to us—our country. Every Fourth of July address is,
or should be, a sermon, the eighth chapter of Deuteron-
omy with its haunting refrain “lest we forget,’ which
Kipling put into verse in the “Recessional.”’

On July 4th every year of the first hundred of our
national existence the eagle used to scream. Then fol-
lowed the era when the shadow of the muck-rake fell
over the land and the eagle sobbed and whined for his
sins, which were not few. But the last few years
have shown us that if this country is not nearer heaven
than Europe it is at any rate farther from hell, so the
eagle has plucked up courage and is screaming again.

This is not the time to rehearse the crimes of George
III. Americans have less desire than ever before to
rail at their British cousins. But we can celebrate the
Fourth of July without being accused of narrow pa-

284

THE BRITISH FOURTH OF JULY 285

triotism, for Independence Day is more than a national
holiday.

The document to which John Hancock and others
appended their signatures on that hot July day in 1776
was not merely the Declaration of the Independence of
the United States. It was also the charter of political
freedom and the right of self-government to the com-
monwealths of Australia and New Zealand, to the Do-
minion of Canada, to the colony of Newfoundland, and
to the Union of South Africa.

The Declaration of Independence gave us our start
in life, a New England farm and a southern plantation.
The rest we have got for ourselves. Not a quarter of
the United States as it exists today was ever under the
British flag. Our histories have been written too ex-
clusively on the Atlantic Coast. History, like the
Constitution, should follow the flag.

We are inclined to think that the hand of God in
history is shown only in that of the Jewish nation, that
no other people has been so signally prospered as a
reward for following the laws of God or so patently
punished for disobedience to them. Really, however,
if we stop to consider it we find that the history of
Israel is the history of every nation. If it were other-
wise it would have no value for us as an object lesson.
The Jews were not a sacred people, they were not a
divinely inspired nation, but they had divinely in-
spired historians. ‘Through Moses and the prophets
there was a succession of men endowed with marvelous
power to discern cause and effect, to show what were
the sins which had brought ruin upon the people and
what were the moral conditions of national prosperity.

286 LEST WE FORGET

It is this historical insight which gives the biblical
records their unique value, and that is why we can
refer to them for help in the interpretation of our own
history.

That the Jews inherited the Promised Land was not
chance; it was not due to irrational favoritism of God
acting like a partial father who in his will disinherits
one son and gives all his property to another. It was
because the Jews deserved this fair and fruitful land
that they got it. It was because they were morally
stronger than the vile and idolatrous Canaanites that
they were able to conquer them in war and enter into
the possession of cities which they did not build and
orchards which they had not planted. This is proved
by the fact that when the Israelites lost their moral
superiority over surrounding nations they were over-
come by them and carried into captivity. War is a
rough arbiter, rude and cruel, but its decisions are
rarely unjust. It is a test from time to time to prove
which people are fitted to survive and to possess the
world. |

The government of God is like that of a wise land-
lord who owns many farms of different value. When
he sees a neglected farm he removes the tenant and
puts in his place one who has been getting larger crops
and keeping his farm in good condition. So a country is
given to that people which can make the best use of it,
and only so long as it is doing better than other nations
can it hold possession. There is not enough land in the
world for any of it to remain idle or in incompetent
hands. A nation is allowed to govern itself only so
long as it can govern itself well. When it ceases to do

OUR TITLE DEEDS 287

that the government is put into the more competent
hands of some other nation.

We are not the original owners of this beautiful
country. Nobody knows how many former tenants
there have been. We know that there was the Indian—
various tribes of different degrees of savagery, whose
only idea of usefulness was to kill the deer and the
buffalo and fight each other. There was the Spaniard,
who searched the country over for gold but cared
nothing for the more valuable coal and iron. He was
not a suitable tenant. There was the Frenchman hunt-
ing for furs or seeking to establish in the wild West a
feudal vassalage for Louis XIV. Still the land was
vacant.

Finally came our own race and took possession not
by accident, not by fate, not by favoritism, but because
we more than other nations were fitted to cultivate it.
Because in our hands it could be made more useful to
humanity than in the hands of the Indian, the Spaniard,
or the Frenchman. Because we can draw the waters of
the mountain brook around our fields and make the
desert fruitful. Because we can dig out the coal and
iron and from them make the thousands of articles
needed by the people in other lands. Because we can
offer to the men who came to us from other nations
freedom, justice, work, and wages.

It is for these reasons that the Lord our God has
given us this land; this land of fountains and depths
that spring out of the valleys and hills; a land wherein
we shall eat bread without scarceness; a land whose
stones are iron, and out of whose hills we may dig coal
and copper.

288 LEST WE FORGET

But let us beware ‘‘lest we forget” on what condi-
tions we hold this fair land. It was not given to us,
it was leased. It was not deeded in fee simple to us, our
heirs and assigns forever; we have merely the usufruct
of it. It is not leased to us in perpetuity, not even for
ninety-nine years, not for any definite period of time,
however short. Our tenure is dependent on our com-
plying with the conditions. These conditions are simply
obedience to the laws of God. Every deed to man or
nation contains this. clause expressed or understood,
and without it every conveyance is null and void. The
Ten Commandments were given to us as to the Jews
with this inducement, ‘“‘that thy days may be prolonged
and it may go well with thee in the land the Lord thy
God giveth thee.” And we have warning by precept
and example that action for dispossession follows im-
mediately on our failure to keep the conditions; ‘‘as the
nations which the Lord destroyeth before your face
so shall ye perish because ye would not be obedient unto
the voice of the Lord your God.”

Since our lives and our country, our prosperity and
happiness, depend on our obedience to God’s com-
mands, it is important to study with the greatest care
this clause in our contract. How then can we know
God’s will? Where can we find God’s laws? Nowhere
in a condensed and easily accessible form. Everywhere
if we look for them. The laws of God are not codified
and we cannot purchase a single volume of “Revised
Statutes” containing all of them. They are written in
our minds and bodies; they are embodied in the
materials with which we work and in the food we eat;
they are expressed in the words of great and good men;

GOD’S POLITICS 289

they are contained in all history properly written.
Some of them are in the Bible, a very small part of
them, but including the most important. Even those
laws of God revealed in the Bible are not so clear as
we should like them to be. They are written in Hebrew
and Greek. I do not refer to the language merely.
We can translate that, but the ideas, the symbols, and
the mode of thought are ancient and foreign. We have
to employ ministers to study them and explain them
to us week after week. Other laws of God, especially
those which govern his material world, are being
studied, arranged, and codified by scientists who de-
vote their lives to this work. God’s laws dealing with
the political and social relations of men are studied by
legislators and jurists and are embodied, more or less
imperfectly, in our statute books. Legislators do not
invent good laws; they formulate them in accordance
with the facts, just as scientists do. If they do formu-
late a false law and pass it, it is null and void by de-
cision of the Supreme Judge of the Universe, and all
the powers of the government, state or national, cannot
enforce it. The more they try to enforce a wrong law,
the more mischief it makes.

Through the labors of theologians, scientists, and
jurists, and all others who try to find and tell the truth,
we have found out many of God’s laws and can see
to some extent why it is that rewards follow their ful-
fillment and punishment their violation. We see that
this is not by the arbitrary act of a capricious despot
but is the direct action of cause and effect, and we rec-
ognize its justice whenever we understand it. God has
linked together, in this world, righteousness and pros-

290 LEST WE FORGET

perity, wrongdoing and misfortune, and what God has
joined together no man may put asunder. When a man
has health it is a sign that he is obeying God’s laws of
hygiene. When a nation is growing in population and
wealth we may assume that it is obeying God’s laws of
political economy. It is the only certain test.

When a chemist discovers a new compound and
wishes to know if it is of value as a medicine he takes
it himself—in small doses. So when some new political
remedy is proposed as a cure for some or all of our
social ills, we should not turn a deaf ear to its enthu-
siastic and often overzealous advocates; neither should
we adopt it blindly as a cure-all. We should simply
try it—in small doses—and carefully watch the effect.

It might be objected—in fact the devil brought for-
ward this suggestion several thousand years ago—that
sometimes the wicked prosper and it is the righteous
who suffer. This is obviously true. We all of us think
that this is the case whenever we suffer. As the rain
falleth alike on the just and the unjust, so the cyclone
deals out death to the good and the bad. We have seen
the wicked flourish and the innocent afflicted. But we
all realize that the prosperity of evil is temporary and
rare, that a lie cannot long endure, and that the truth
is mighty and shall prevail. Wickedness does not pay;
that is the great lesson of life. Happy are those who
learn it from precept instead of experience.

We talk about the desirability of getting God on our
side in any conflict or cause. We sometimes try to
get God to espouse our cause by bribes or petitions. |
We try to get some good man who might be supposed
to have a “pull” with the Almighty to exert his influ-

OUR SACRED HISTORY 291

ence in our behalf. Now there is only one way of get-
ting God on our side, and that is to get on God’s side.
We can always be sure of being on the winning side if
we find out which side is right and join that. The
only way to get God’s favor is to do his will. He rec-
ognizes no professed adherents—only followers. His
rewards are not misplaced.

If we as a nation have enjoyed to an exceptional
degree the favor of God, it cannot be that it was alto-
gether undeserved. It is our virtues, not our vices,
which have brought us this remarkable prosperity and
we therefore have a right to take pride in it. In fact,
it is the only thing we have the right to take pride in;
anything else is vanity and conceit. A nation becomes
formidable through its virtues and dangerous through
its vices.

Our history properly written would show the hand
of Providence guiding and controlling a nation as
clearly as the biblical histories. It should be written,
as they were, from the standpoint of God rather than
that of man. It should be written as a general on the
hilltop writes the history of a battle, not as it was seen
by a private in the ranks. So written, our history
would be found not less remarkable and instructive
than the history of the Jews in the Bible. It would tell
of the flight of our ancestors, Catholic and Protestant,
from persecution and oppression as the followers of
Moses fled from Egypt. It would tell of the wandering
of our race in deserts far wider than Sinai, of battles
with barbarous inhabitants of the land and their over-
throw. It would narrate the curious chain of events,
of court intrigues and corrupt statesmanship, by which

292 LEST WE FORGET

the western part of this country fell into the hands of
the only man in Europe who would have sold it, and
at a time when he had to have money. We have built
greater cities than Jerusalem and grander temples than
Solomon’s. We have blown down stronger walls than
those of Jericho, and have crossed dry-shod wider rivers
than Jordan.

One way of valuing anything is by knowing its price.
We begin to appreciate the value of this heritage of
ours when we study history and learn what it has cost.
When we think of the thousands who have given their
lives to free our country and to preserve it intact, when
we think of the millions who have labored, each at his
own task, great or small, to make our country what it
is, then we know what our heritage is worth. We are
the heirs of all the ages. Our civilization, our language,
our science, our ideas of right and justice, our religion,
we have inherited and we must see to it that we guard
well what has been entrusted to us. Our country and
our civilization are not ours alone; they must be passed
on to our posterity undiminished and unimpaired. We
are simply the trustees of this estate and must not
squander it for our personal pleasure. We must pre-
serve it by righteousness and wisdom. I put them
together because they are really the same thing. We
hear actions called righteous which are not wise, and
deeds called wise which are not right, but it is a mis-
take, an impossibility. It is wise only to do right.

We must not live in selfish enjoyment of our herit-
age, thinking it will last our time, saying as the reck-
less king, “After us the deluge.’ We must leave no
small evil to grow, no sores in the body politic to fester

FOES OF THE HOUSEHOLD 293

into dangerous wounds. We know what our forefathers
the founders of the Republic thought about slavery.
It was bad, they realized, but it was a little thing, a
tumor which it would hurt to cut out. The nation was
weak and any decisive action would have alienated
some of the states. Perhaps slavery would die out;
anyway, it would not grow. But it did grow, and it
required one of the bloodiest wars of modern history to
cut this tumor from the breast of the nation. Let us
beware lest we make the same mistake, leaving some
other social injustice to grow and inflame until riot or
war is the only remedy.

Nations are always conquered from the inside. So
long as we are morally strong we shall be strong in
every other way. Our only dangerous foes are within
the country, not without. Those who perpetrate in-
justice, those who appeal to violence, those who stir
up class hatred are the men whom we as a nation have
to dread and against whom we have to protect ourselves.
Liberty and independence, law and order, are not pre-
served by written constitutions and statutes; not by
police and armies; not by wealth and success, but by
the morality of the people. The government and insti-
tutions of a country cannot rise much higher than the
general ethical level. We cannot expect a government
to be honest while the people are dishonest. The man-
agement of public finances will not be honest so long
as the people dodge taxes. Legislators will not take
care of public money as though it were their own so
long as the people do not treat public property as they
would their own. Soldiers will loot and destroy if the
people lynch. Railroads will charge unfair rates so

294 LEST WE FORGET

long as passengers will use tickets over again if the
conductor fails to collect them. It is personal wicked-
ness which makes our laws and institutions work so
badly, and we are quite safe in thinking that no other
sociological contrivances, however cunningly devised,
will work much better until the foundation of all so-
ciety, which is the average morality, is raised.
Whether, then, we as a people shall prosper or go
bankrupt depends simply on whether each one of us is
worth his wages. Are you giving to society an amount
of service equivalent to what you spend on yourself?
Are you working your way, or are you sponging on the
rest? Each man, as he receives his three dollars, his
five dollars, or ten dollars for his day’s work, ought
to consider what he has done that day for other people
which entitles him to that amount of money. If a
carpenter, has he made something that day worth so
much more than the lumber? If a lawyer, has he to
that extent helped to obtain justice and insure fair deal-
ing? Ifa merchant, has he been of so much service to
society in the distribution of goods? If not, then of
course he has cheated his neighbors, and cannot call
himself an honest man, no matter how willingly the
money was paid to him. This is elementary morality.
The ideal Christian standard is higher yet. This re-
quires not only that you give as much service to society
as is expected of you for the wages you receive, but
also that you do all that you possibly can. The com-
mon plan is to work as few hours as possible and to get
as much for itas you can. Trusts and trade unions are
organized with that aim, and strikes and lockouts are
for that purpose. This, of course, is precisely the op-

THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WORKS 295

posite of the Christian plan, which is to do as much for
others as you can and take as little as possible for
yourself.

Our duty as tenants of this domain is primarily to
develop it. It was let to us unfinished and unfurnished,
only partially fit for human habitation. The days of
creation are not ended. In various places the igneous
formations are still being made, the rough forge work
which was finished in most of the world hundreds of
thousands of years ago. Everywhere we see some-
thing left for us to do. To complete the work of crea-
tion is our religious duty as much as anything else.

In that ancient religion which is nearest akin to the
Jewish, and from which we Christians have borrowed
much, this idea is clearly expressed. To dig an irriga-
tion ditch is better than saying many prayers; to kill
a wolf is as good as to sing a hymn. So spake Zara-
thustra. And thus saith the Lord of Hosts by the
mouth of his prophet Jeremiah: “Build ye houses and
dwell in them, and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of
them.”” The evolutionist who creates a new crop is a
true disciple of the Creator.

It may be said that this gospel of work does not need
preaching at the present time and in this country. It
may not need to be taught, but it does need to be
preached. But what we do need to have called to our
attention is the religious aspect of such service; thank-
fulness for our opportunities for such work, a realiza-
tion of our duty to do it, and a sense of our responsi-
bility for doing it well, lest we forget.

We Americans do not believe that people should
be pressed into the same mold, machined to the same

296 LEST WE FORGET

pattern. It was to escape such a process that many
of us or our ancestors came to America.

America was populated by the persecuted. Puritans
from England, Huguenots from France, Germans from
the Rhine, Catholics from Ireland, Czecho-Slovaks
from Austria-Hungary, Armenians from Turkey, Jews
from Russia. These are but a few of those who fled
to America for freedom from the religious, economic,
racial, or military oppression at home. All these were
protestants and nonconformists in the original sense of
these words, whether they were Catholics or Congre-
gationalists. ‘They were a chosen people—chosen to
be kicked out from their native lands. Whether our
fathers came over in the Mayflower along with a ship-
load of furniture and pewter ware or whether they
came over later in the more comfortable accommoda-
tions of a steamer steerage, it was mostly because they
were considered undesirable citizens that they were
forced or permitted to depart.

America is a chosen land—selected out of all parts
of the world as their future home by those who desired
or were obliged to leave their native homes. This is an
honor that we should appreciate and endeavor to serve.
The United States is a synthetic nation. Other coun-
tries “just growed,” like Topsy. Ours is the conscious
and considered creation of its people. European and
Asiatic countries are almost entirely populated by those
who were born there and did not have energy enough to
get away. Our population is largely composed of those
who were not born here and had energy enough to
come. What is called patriotism is sometimes not love
of country but mere laziness. Our patriotism is less

WE ARE THE STATE 297

alloyed with this element than any other, for a large
proportion of Americans love America because they
have lived elsewhere. They came here because they
thought they would find it best; they stay here because
they have found it best. Americanism is an elective
course.

Our form of government is no hand-me-down from a
former generation, no misfit borrowed from another
land. It is made to measure and remade to fit. Our
social system is more of a skin than a coat. It grows
with us. Every man his own tailor is the law of democ-
racy. The king of France said, “I am the State.” It
was a lie and they cut off his head for it. The Ameri-
can citizen says “I am the State,” and it is the literal
truth. All men are monarchs. This develops a sense
of responsibility. In other lands the people can com-
plain, “Why don’t they do it?” In America we can
only wonder, ‘“‘Why don’t we do it?”

Consequently the first lesson to be taught to an im-
migrant is that patriotism in the American sense is a
different thing from Old World patriotism. American-
ism does not mean loyalty to a king; it does not mean
attachment to a particular spot of ground; it does not
mean conformity to a fixed code of customs; it does not
mean the perpetuation of traditional institutions; it
does not mean the aversion to novel and foreign ideas;
it does not mean hostility toward those who differ from
us.

Americanism is one of the fine arts, the finest of all
the fine arts, the art of getting along peaceably with
all sorts and conditions of men. We Americans have
had more experience with the practice of this art than

298 LEST WE FORGET

other nations, and it is not undue boasting to say that
we have acquired a certain proficiency in it. A steel
mill may contain twenty different nationalities, and
they do not quarrel any more than so many Irishmen
or Poles in their native land. A city block is a map of
Europe in miniature. ‘The immigrants try to keep up
their traditional antipathies, but there are few Old
World feuds that, if let alone, can resist the solvent
atmosphere of America. Their children when they go
to school call each other names and stretch their little
necks trying to look down on one another. And when
they grow up they go into partnership or intermarry.
So, scrapping and bargaining, quarreling and flirting,
studying together and working together, they learn to
know each other and become good Americans together.

No nation was ever before put to such a strain as
ours in the Great War, for none ever contained so many
representatives of the belligerent nationalities; yet none
proved more stable and strong. Our national motto
was not true when it was adopted, but it is now. At
last the American people, regardless of racial diversity,
can say with sincerity: United we stand.

THE NINE SONS OF SATAN
(Not a Sermon but a Fable)

Now in the days before Adam, when Satan was alone
on the earth, Allah made a helpmeet for him out of the
smokeless flame. And Awwa was the name of Satan’s
wife and she bore him nine sons, not born after the
manner of men, but hatched like serpents of leathern
eggs in the sands of the desert where the sun stands
overhead at noon. And it came to pass when men be-
gan to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters
were born to them, that the sons of Satan saw the
daughters of men that they were fair and they took
them wives of all which they chose. And their children
were called jinns and they increased and multiplied ex-
ceedingly, and spread abroad over all the earth and to
the islands of the sea and into the land which is beyond
the great waters. And every land wherein they went,
there they abide to this day. But men know not the
sons of Satan save by their works; for they are fash-
ioned after the likeness of man, and appear as angels
of light.

In the days when the earth was young the sons of
Satan had little to do, for all mankind dwelt together
in one place, tilling the soil or tending the flocks. And
their sins were like themselves, few and simple. But
after their tongues were confounded, and they were

scattered abroad according to their nations, they
299

300 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

sought out many inventions. Then had the genera-
tions of jinns to change their ways and adopt the new
inventions and divide their labors among themselves,
each according to his ability.

FIRST SON

The Arabian authors, to whose surprisingly wide
knowledge I am indebted for most of the above, have
even recorded for us the names of the nine sons of
Satan and their respective functions. The oldest of
them, or if not the oldest, one of the first to get busy,
was Haffan, whom the Greeks call Dionysos, and the
Latins Bacchus, and the Prohibitionists the Demon
Rum. Noah planted a vineyard soon after all the world
had gone wet, and quite innocently took to grape juice
as a beverage. But Haffan, with the aid of some mil-
lions of microscopic jinns, known nowadays as sac-
charomyces cerevisiz, introduced into it a subtle poison
which brought disgrace upon Noah as it has upon so
many of his descendants.

But Haffan’s power for evil was limited in ancient
times, because, try as he would, he never could bring
the alcoholic content of wine, beer, and cider above
five or ten per cent. Here the fermentation stopped,
for the little devils in the drink died of the poison they
had brewed. The drink was then strong enough to
make men foolish and slothful and loose-lipped, but
these effects soon wore off and rarely carried his victim
on to those mad deeds which alone could satisfy Haf-
fan’s diabolical ambitions. Not until the twelfth cen-
tury after Christ were means discovered by which he

THE BOTTLE IMP 301

could turn out a product capable of matching in wick-
edness anything his brothers could do. It is, as we
might expect, an Arabian chemist, Abdulcasim, who is
discredited with the invention of distillation by which
brandy, whisky, and liquors of any desired strength
can be manufactured. He put his product on the
market under the trade name of the Elixir of Life, or
eau de vie. But it turned out to be something quite the
opposite. Such tricks as these gave to chemistry the
name of the Black Art and brought the science under a
cloud of suspicion from which it has but recently and
not yet altogether emerged. It was long the popular
belief that chemists were inspired of the devil or were
the sons of Satan in disguise, and indeed the certifica-
tion of such suspicion may be found in the records of
many courts where chemists were found guilty, either
by the testimony of experts or by their own confession
under torture, of having sold themselves to the Evil
One in exchange for their skill.

SECOND SON

Chemistry has also been the chief aid of another of
the sons of Satan, Lakis, the Fire Fiend. He seems to
have inherited his mother’s ardent disposition, but his
power also was at first limited and

He grieved he bin
Too small to sin
To the hight of his desire.

The most he could do in antiquity was to burn a hut
by upsetting an oil lamp or wipe out a village with a

302 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

forest fire. So he spent most of his time haunting the
bitumen lakes of Baku, where the priests of Zara-
thustra kept the Eternal Flame alight. His brethren,
Awan and Zulbaysun, who lived in the city and did a
thriving business in court and counting-house, used to
come and sit on the crest of the Caucasus, with their
legs dangling over the precipice, and make fun of him
for wading around knee-deep in the asphalt. Then La-
kis, mightily vexed, stuck his pitchfork down deep
through the crust of the lake and cast the pitch far up
the mountain-side so that it bespattered their fine rai-
ment, while out of the hole there rose a dreadful black
smoke and stench as though it came from the depth of
Tophet. Then as Awan and Zulbaysun flew away down
the Euphrates valley toward Bagdad, he shouted after
them and said: ‘Smell that, O my brothers, and know
that the time shall come when men shall leave your
cities and seek the waste places of the earth where this,
my treasure, is found. And when one shall strike the
rock there shall gush forth a fountain of oil without
measure, and then will your merchant princes, O Zul-
baysun, be as beggars before him, and your kings, O
Awan, become as his hirelings. For in those days shall
chariots of fire run about the streets and with the tenth
part of an ephah of fined oil shall they outrun the
swiftest horse of Arabia and kijl many people. And
men shall go under the sea in the belly of a leviathan
wrought of iron for the greater peril of those who go
down to the sea in ships, and make themselves rocs on
whose wings they may fly like the jinns over mountain
and sea.” And after many days it came to pass even as
he had said.

THE DEEDS OF LUCIFER 303

But Lakis in the meantime, while waiting for the
fulfillment of his prophecy, was not idle, but kept his
agents experimenting in many lands. In the kingdom
of Sin, which is in Far Cathay, dwelt a man who, in-
spired of Lakis, burned willows and made charcoal and
went into the desert and scraped up saltpeter and into
the mountains and dug brimstone. All these he got and
brayed them together in a mortar and gave of the mix-
ture to his countrymen for a weapon of offense. But
the Sinae were a peaceful and a foolish folk and they
only made firecrackers out of the powder for merri-
ment at weddings and funerals.

But Lakis had better luck when he got the ear of a
monk in the West, Roger Bacon by name, a notorious
wizard. For then men began to make guns bigger and
bigger every year until they got up to forty-two centi-
meters. And Lakis showed them how to dip qutun, as
the Arabs call it, or as we say “cotton,” into Strong
Water and to dissolve it in the al kohol, invented by
Haffan, and with this to load the guns. Then would
flames and thunder burst forth like afreets from a bot-
tle, and ten miles away a hundred soldiers would fall
down dead by this magic.

And much other mischief did Lakis do. The inven-
tion of matches was ascribed to him, as their original
name of “lucifers” showed. This put into the hands of
every evil-minded man or silly child the power to set
fire to a home or perhaps to burn a city. The number
of Fire Worshipers increased in the latter days until
one saw in the streets almost every man and many of
the boys carrying in their mouths a lighted weed giving
forth the incense most pleasing to the nostrils of Lakis.

304 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

So in the course of time Lakis, whom the Northmen
called ‘‘Loki” and the Latins ‘‘Lux,” came to be es-
teemed the greatest instead of the least of all the sons
of Satan. No magic was more powerful than his, and
when one would prove his devilish origin, like Mephis-
topheles in the ratskeller, he would draw forth fire by
scratching the table, a miracle which nowadays any-
body can perform, so well has Lakis taught his lesson
to the world.

THIRD SON

Now I would not have you suppose from the incident
mentioned above that the sons of Satan were always
quarreling. On the contrary, they were kept so busy
that their idle hands found little mischief to do, except,
of course, in their professional capacity. Save for an
occasional squabble over which should be greatest in
the kingdom of Iblis they got on together better than
most human brethren and threw a good deal of busi-
ness in each other’s way. For instance, Lakis would
never have prospered as maker of munitions if it had
not been for his brother Awan, who was Councilor of
Kings. He had his minions in every ministry and prac-
tically controlled the diplomatic service of the world.
In that way he was able to stir up wars and rumors of
wars at any time and keep national jealousy and race
hatreds always aflame. In the old days men only went
to war once a year or so, and not all of them then, and
they took care to get back in time for harvest, or, at
any rate, before the cold weather set in. But in the
course of centuries Awan got things in such a fix that

DEMOCRACY AND THE DEVIL 305

wars lasted all the year round, and even in time of so-
called peace a large part of the young men were serving
in the army and others spent all of their days in the
shops of Lakis making arms and ammunition. And
acting on the advice of Awan the kings invested money
in each other’s gun shops, so it often happened that
when they went to war they found themselves con-
fronted with weapons made by their own people and
were attacked by warships from their own yards. For
the sons of Satan are no respecters of persons and quite
devoid of race prejudice.

Finally it occurred to some people that if they could
get rid of kings they would get rid of the evil council
of Awan. But that did not help matters much. Though
they put four and twenty barons to rule over the king
and four hundred and twenty commons to rule over the
barons, and forty-two million voters to rule over the
commons, Awan’s influence grew none the less. He al-
ways seemed to be able to get hold of the man higher
up, however low down he might be.

FOURTH SON

In thus perverting the opinions of the people Awan’s
chief aid was his younger brother, Masbut the Tattler.
Like the rest of the family, Masbut began business in a
small way, using as his agents chiefly women and bar-
bers. This was voluntary and unpaid labor, amateur-
ish at best, although it is astonishing how active and
diligent some of them were in the spreading of news,
especially of a discreditable nature, and how much
harm could be accomplished in a community by such

306 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

amateur efforts. “He that increaseth knowledge in-
creaseth sorrow,” especially when it isn’t so.

It was not until the invention of printing that Mas-
but really got his start and scandalmongery was put
upon a professional basis. Like Lakis, he tried to
Jaunch his discovery in China, but a country without
an alphabet is no place for the printing business. But
when Gutenberg once got it going in Germany it be-
came one of the most efficient means of extending the
kingdom of the Father of Lies. Books were too slow,
the presses took to turning out quarterlies, then month-
lies, weeklies, dailies, and hourlies, and those that came
out oftenest served the purpose of Masbut best.

The mails were too slow for him, so he borrowed the
lightning of Lakis and spread the news by copper wires
and ether waves. When a lie travels at the rate of
186,000 miles a second it is hard for the truth to catch
up with it. It is strange to think that once this im-
portant business of news-spreading was left to the cas-
ual calls of housewives or chance meetings on the
Agora, the Rialto, or the corner grocery, when we now
see its ramifications covering the world as with a net.
Every day forests are cut down and ground up to be
stamped with black words. Schools are established to
educate young men in the art of gathering news and
dishing it up to suit the popular taste. This gives
Masbut his chance, for with every truth he mingles
some falsehood so cunningly that even those who are
trained to handle the news cannot disentangle it. In
fact, we may be sure that no considerable piece of
wickedness is put through without the aid of Masbut,
the Printer’s Devil.

THE DEMON ON THE HEARTH 307

FIFTH SON

It is he who transmits the misleading messages of
Awan the Diplomatist and publishes them in books
named from the colors of the rainbow. He is also the
right-hand man of Zulbaysun, who makes mischief in
bazaars and turns the river of gold to his own purposes.
*Twas Zulbaysun who blew the South Sea bubble and
many a bigger since. He robs widows and orphans of
their inheritance and brings the honest merchant to
ruin. In the old days he confined himself to such
picayune business as clipping coins and tampering with
weights and measures. But our complex interdigita-
tion of credit gives him an opportunity for operations
on a large scale and in secrecy. So active is he that
there are many people who consider him responsible
for all the deviltry in the world. Capitalism, they call
him, with strong accent on the second syllable, and
they believe that if he were banished the earth would be
a utopia, forgetting that there are eight other devils as
wicked as he.

SIXTH SON

Dasim, the sixth of the sons of Satan, is a domestic
devil. The hearthstone was his primary place of busi-
ness, and the substitution of the steam radiator has by
no means decreased his opportunities. He instigates
the sharp retort; he directs the poisoned arrow at the
weakest joints in the armor of self-esteem as they have
been disclosed in the intimacy of family life. He
lights the flame of illicit love and fires the train of

308 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

jealousy that leads to crime. In his sphere of influ-
ence the progress of invention has made less change
than it has with his brothers, for he works on the primi-
tive emotions, the desires and appetites that remain the
same through all the ages in spite of changes in custom.
The laws of sociological geometry are eternal and the
triangle has three sides in every land. A writ in Reno
may take the place of a bag in the Bosporus, but the
principle remains the same. Dasim has always given
special attention tothe dinner table, the center of do-
mestic disunion. It is he who cools the coffee and over-
does the steak, in order to make them subjects of break-
fast controversy. A person into whom he has entered
is euphemistically said to have dyspepsia, sick head-
ache, liver complaint, or something of the kind, but
everybody in the house knows what is the matter. He
hath a devil. Dasim’s bad cooking is, some folks say,
responsible for as much mischief as his brother Haffan
has accomplished with his wine. Nothing is too petty
for him. He will possess at times the best-tempered
youngster, and he displays a most diabolical ingenuity
in spoiling a well planned dinner party by instigating
a malapropos remark or introducing a controversial
topic. He is the inventor of a code of table etiquette
that has caused a heap of unhappiness, for a violation
of it, such as the picking up of the wrong fork or send-
ing the wine around the table against the sun brings
down upon the offender a greater social penalty than a
conventional breach of the moral law. He also intro-
duced the tipping system and after-dinner speeches.
Dasim does not confine his activities to the dining-room.
He also holds sway in the kitchen and is the fomenter

THE MELOMANIAC 309

of all the trouble with maids, cooks, and help generally,
to say nothing about the trouble they have with their
employers. On the whole, Dasim is not the least among
his brethren, even though they do make a lot of fun of
him because he does not introduce modern improve-
ments, but sticks to the same old tricks that he used in
the days of Eve and Lilith, and Jacob and Esau.

SEVENTH SON

One of his closest associates, next to Haffan, is Mar-
rah, who as the master of music and dancing runs one
of the broadest and most enticing highways leading to
the halls of Iblis. Hardly had Jubal got out his patents
on the first string and wind instruments before Marrah
began to pervert them to his own purposes. As soon as
Dionysos had stuck together the hollow reeds of his
syrinx and Apollo had stretched the strings across the
tortoise shell Marrah took possession of them. In
Africa he uses the tom-tom, in America the phonograph
or jazz band, to excite uncontrollable passions. He in-
spired the Lydian strains which soften the moral fiber.
He taught the Sirens and the Lorelei. Young and other-
wise charming virgins are deceived by him into think-
ing that they have musical genius, and then they spend
years and all the money they can borrow in trying to
reach high C and hammering ivory with their finger
tips, causing thereby much misery to all within earshot,
who nevertheless are inspired to encourage the practice
by complimentary lies. He devised the nautch, the fox-
trot, the corroboree, the bunny hug, the fandango, the
bacchanale, the waltz, and the can-can, and may be re-

310 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

lied upon to bring out half a dozen new variations of
the old motif within the next few years, for his ingenu-
ity is inexhaustible. The whole horde of hops, dips,
glides, skips, scrambles, hugs, squirms, prances, kicks,
cuddles, writhes, and wiggles come from his fertile
brain. He is the St. Vitus of the infernal hagiology.
The saxophone and radio are his latest aids.

- EIGHTH SON

It must not be supposed that in this division of labor
the church is neglected. On the contrary there is a spe-
cial ecclesiastical department, and this is under the ef-
ficient management of Dulhan, eighth of the sons of
Iblis. The children of Dulhan attend church regularly,
rarely missing a service of any denomination. Sitting
invisibly by the side of the would-be worshipers they
whisper inaudibly to distract attention from the devo-
votions proper to the place and hour. They set the eye
to roving over the congregation, and whatsoever it falls
upon suggests some critical or malicious comment.
Perhaps it is a question of the taste of a lady in the
matter of headgear; perhaps it is a suspicion of the
business morals of a pillar of the church; anything may
serve the purpose of frustrating the aim of the service.
The Beni Dulhan even enter the pulpit and whisper
doubts to the preacher of the usefulness of his work,
the truth of his message, and the sincerity of his hear-
ers. Buta better field even than the pews or the pulpit
they find in the choir loft. Here, in complicity with
his brother Marrah, the musical fiend, Dulhan can
cause any amount of mischief, and it is not without

BEELZEBUB 311

reason that certain of the stricter sects have banished
choirs and musical instruments altogether.

Unlike the rest of his brethren, it cannot be said
that the advance of civilization has enlarged the scope
of Dulhan’s operations, though some would say that
this was because he had been quite too successful in his
efforts at undermining the church. At any rate Dulhan
no longer has the power he used to have when the secu-
lar arm was at his disposal, when the auto-da-fé was a
public holiday, the rack and thumbscrews in operation,
and kings trembled at the threat of bell, book, and
candle. Nowadays, except for an occasional pogrom
in Poland or a riot in India, Dulhan’s power of perse-
cution does not extend beyond a farcical and ineffec-
tive trial for heresy. But as superintendent of the
paving department of the highways leading to the in-
fernal regions he is kept as busy as ever.

NINTH SON

It is not necessary to dwell upon the deeds of Wassin,
or, aS some authorities call him, Tir, ninth of Satan’s
sons, because they are conspicuous and dreaded by all.
He it is who is responsible for all public calamities, for
battle and tempest, for plague, pestilence, and famine,
and all like ills from which the Litany beseeches deliv-
erance. The destruction of Pompeii and Messina, of
Lisbon and Tokyo, are among his achievements. In
the line of hydraulics he has doubtless never surpassed
his first exploit in the days of Noah, though on account
of the sparse population of the globe at that time the
destruction was not so great as might have been ex-

312 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

pected from the effort. Of all the infernal family there
is none with a greater host of helpers than Wassin.
Their name is legion. The sands of the sea are scanty
in comparison. What is more, they have the magic
power of becoming invisible and multiplying by the mil-
lion within a few minutes, so that a city is devastated
in a day by a pestilence. With an innumerable host
of bacteria, bacilli, microbes, parasites, he invades the
bodily citadel, and then man falls a victim to the Black
Death, the White Plague, the Yellow Fever, or the Scar-
let Fever, to the pestilence that walketh in darkness or
the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

Formerly it was supposed that death was carried on
the wings of the wind, so Wassin was called ‘Prince of
the Power of the Air” or “Malaria.” We now know
that he mostly makes use of insects as his agents of
transmission, and this identifies him with Beelzebub,
the God of Flies, and makes him responsible for at
least seven of the ten plagues of Egypt. Zarathustra,
one of the wisest of the prophets who have appeared
upon the earth in the course of centuries to warn man-
kind of the wiles of the sons of Satan, taught his fol-
lowers that to kill an insect was the best way of saying
a prayer, and that to dig a drainage ditch was more
acceptable to Ahura-Mazda than to burn a fat bullock
on the altar. So, too, Goethe tells us that Faust
achieved deliverance from the bonds of Mephistopheles,
not by fasting and penance, but by turning his atten-
tion to sanitary engineering.

Thus the unending warfare goes on between the Sons
of Eve and the Sons of Awwa. On strange battlefields
and with novel arms, but the fight is ever the same;

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE 313

new wiles are met with new defenses, mines are coun-
termined, and wits match wits. ’Tis hard to tell at any
time which way the conflict turns, for the Heavenly and
Diabolic Hosts, as they descending and ascending meet
upon this our world, adopt confusing disguises, fight
under false flags, and often wrest from their opponents
their most effective weapons. Our wildered eyes fail to
distinguish the Angels of Light from the Angels of
Darkness, and we strike out blindly at friend and foe.
In this Holy War for the possesson of Mansoul there
are no neutrals or noncombatants and never is a truce
declared. Yet the land is fair to look upon and we
often forget that it is a battlefield until of a sudden we
are struck down and grievously wounded by a missile
from some unseen source. We need sharper eyesight
and a more understanding brain if we are to resist all
the wiles of the devil. For this we must eat of the fruit
of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but that
stands in the midst of the Garden of Eden and an angel
with a flaming sword guards the gate of it.

Still, our case is not altogether hopeless. We evi-
dently do get a bite of this Forbidden Fruit once in a
while, and I will explain to you how it happens, for not
many people know the secret. It seems that Eve, like
some—not all—of her daughters, was an economical
soul, and when she had eaten the apple clear down to
the core she thought it a pity to throw it away, as Adam
did his. So she saved the seed and carried it out of
the garden with her, past the terrible sentinel, by put-
ting it in a pocket which she had cleverly concealed,
after the manner of women, in the folds of her fig-leaf
apron.

314 THE NINE SONS OF SATAN

Now what became of the apple seeds nobody knows.
Very likely they got scattered along the trail as the
evicted pair wandered about in search of a new home,
for we may assume that the pocket had a hole in it,
since Eve had not had much practice at needlework,
and an eyeless locust thorn with a vine tendril hitched
to it does not make a very handy needle and thread, as
you would know if you had tried it. It does not appear
that Eve made any systematic attempt to plant them,
or, if she did, Adam must have rooted out the seed-
lings as weeds or Cain pulled them up from mischief.
Anyhow, after the babies came Eve was too busy and
too happy to think much about the lost paradise. This,
I say, is all speculation, and your guess is as good as
mine, if not better. All we know is that somehow the
Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge got scattered all over
the world and is found today in the most unexpected
places. Every little while somebody gets hold of one
of the apples and it makes him wise. Sometimes he is
wise enough to save the seed and try to cultivate it.
The universities are all supposed to run nurseries for
raising the fruit and grafting it on to common stock,
but it’s hard work and some years the yield is mighty
slim. ‘The trouble is that in the course of centuries the
Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has got crossed with
all kinds of other trees. There is not a pure strain of
it anywhere in the world. When they attempt to grow
it pure by cuttings or self-fertilization it dies out.
Then again it pops up as a mutant on all sorts of
shrubs. It appears, transforms, and disappears in a
more perplexing way than that Cnothera which the
Mendelists are always talking about.,

YE SHALL BE AS GODS 315

But in spite of all this some real progress is being
made in the cultivation of the fruit, especially in recent
years, and in time we may hope that there will be
enough of it to go around. For it is the only antidote
to the poison disseminated by the Sons of Satan. One
who could live on it alone would be absolutely immune
to all their witchcraft. For instance, enough has been
grown to paralyze whole hosts of Wassin’s pestilential
myrmidons.

Whenever men eat of the Fruit of the Tree they be-
come as Gods knowing good and evil. Unto them is
given knowledge of the words which make powerless
the mightiest of the offspring of the Evil One. Then
may they command the jinns and afreets and they will
obey; they will become the servants of man, the slaves
of the lamp, and obedient to the ring which bears the
seal of Solomon the Wise. Though a jinn may cover the
earth like a tempest cloud, yet at the word of one who
knows he will change into a mist and shrink together
and condense until he can enter a brass bottle. Then
the bottle can be stopped with a leaden seal whereon is
engraved the Great Name of God and cast into the sea
to remain for all the ages of ages.’

1 The germ of this fantasia may be found in a footnote to “The
Thousand Nights and a Night” (V. III, p. 229) by Sir Richard
Burton, who doubtless knew more of devilry than any man since
Faust. I am also indebted for a suggestion to Papini, who pro-
fessed to have it on the lowest authority as he tells in “Que le
Diable me dit” in the Mercure de France. Papini after the war
repented of his past and wrote an ecstatic Life of Christ that be-
came one of our best sellers. “The Nine Sons of Satan” was pub-

lished in The Unpopular Review of January, 1915, and I am in-
debted to Mr. Henry Holt for the privilege of reprinting it.

INDEX

Aaron, 50

Abiogenesis, 231

Abraham, 58, 90, 236

Adam, 5

Adversity, 137

Ajax, 74

Aked, 260

Alcohol, 300

American Revolution, 37
Amos, 61

Angels, 9, 58

Angels of Mons, 126
Anglo-Saxons, 279
Anthropomorphism, 52, 72, 77
Antinomies, 208
Antiquarianism, 150

Aquinas, Thomas, 39, 213, 222
Architects, 54

Arnold, Matthew, 119

Artists, 53, III

Astrology, 132, 147

Augustine, 30, 116, 264
Authorized Version, 255, 262

Bacon, 87, 150

Baptism, 26, 45

Barnard, 99

Bergerac, Cyrano de, 206
Bergson, 160

Bible, 46, 590

Black and White, 78
Blake, 85, 118

Bohr’s atomic theory, 213
“Bovarysme,” 172

Bragg, Sir William, 208
Brooks, Phillips, 37
Browning, 28, 171

Bryan, William Jennings, 131
Burton, Sir Richard, 313

Carlyle, 43, 123

Chemistry, 36, 290

Chemistry of the Greatest Mir-
acle in the Bible, 3

Chesterton, Gilbert K., 112

Church as a Promoter, 30

Columbus, 91, 151

Communion, 26

Conservatives, 158

Copernicus, 211

Dalton, 214

Danforth, Ralph E., 235
Dark Ages, III
Darwinism, 160, 203, 233
Daudet, Léon, 120
Davenport, C. B., 232
David, 62

Democritus, 213
Demonology, 129, 2990
De Quincey, 122

Devils, 71, 209

Divining rods, 130
Doyle, Sir Conan, 126
Drake, 127

Duty of Intelligence, 189

Each in His Own Tongue, 252
Eddington, 210, 217, 218
Education, 162

Edwards, Jonathan, 39, 213
Edwin, King, 279

Einstein, 203, 214

Elisha, 62

Erasmas, 264

Ethics, 202

Ethics of Evolution, 226
Eugenics, 234

Eve, 229, 300, 314

Evil, 100

Evolution, 160, 207, 226, 233

317

318 INDEX

Faith, 82, 87
Faraday, 87
Fourth of July, 284
Franklin, 79
Funeral customs, 15

Galileo, 204, 210
Gandhi, 114

Garden of Eden, 17
Gaultier, Jules de, 172
Geometry of Ethics, 200
Goethe, 73

God, Pictures of, 48
God’s laws, 288

Good Samaritan, 34
Goodspeed, 252, 262, 265
Gravitation, 84

Great Backsliding, 106
Gregory, 274

Haldane, J. B. S., 109
Haldane, Viscount, 223
Hammurabi, 123
Harding, President, 129
Heaven, 19

Hellwald, 119

Henry, Patrick, 38
Heraclitus, 14

Higher Critics, 67
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 268
Homer, 52

Hugo, 99

Huxley, 36, 116
Hypocrisy, 164

Independent, The, 37
Inge, Dean, 222
Intelligence, 190
Internal Conflict, the, 94
Inverted Hypocrisy, 164

JaeKe Wieden e
Jacob, 16, 66, 70
Jastrow, Joseph, 128
Jeanne d’Arc, I
Jeans, J. H., 215
Jefferson, 60, 91
Jehovah, 71
Jephthah, 71

Job, 194, 260

John the Baptist, 236, 248
Jordan, David Starr, 125, 132
Joshua, 8

Kepler, 75

King James Version, 173, 255,
262, 267

Kipling, Rudyard, 136, 167, 284

Kitchener, 127

Koran, 59

Lamb, Charles, 27

Lambuth, David K., 129

Lawrence, D. H., 122

Laws of nature, 5, 74, 88

Lest We Forget, 284

Lodge, Sir Oliver, 125, 214

Looking Backward and Living
Forward, 142

Lowell, 17, 36

Lucretius, 52, 213

Lying, 165, 175

Machen, Arthur, 126

Magic, 132

Marcus Aurelius, 261
Materialism, 157, 221
Mathews, A. P., 12

Matter, 213, 217

Metchnikoff, 116

Mill, John Stuart, 118
Millikan, R. A., 240
Minister, 20

Miracles, 3

Missionary Talk, 273
Modern English versions, 270
Moffatt, 260

Mohammed, 54

Moses, 50, 54, 66, 90, 105, 123
Music, 31, 44, 53, 300

Nature, 68, 74, 88, 118

Nef, 73

Nevins, John L., 129

New Testament, 71, 256, 262
Newton, 83, 214, 242
Nietzsche, 122

Nine Sons of Satan, 299

INDEX

Nordmann, Charles, 215

Old Testament, 51, 63, 71, 105,

193
Origin of Species, 233

Pagan, II5

Painting the Picture of God, 48

Palestine, 27, 29

Pau, 71

Papini, 252, 313

Pastor and preacher, 42

Patriotism, 22

Patten, William, 238

Paul, 98, 103, I16, 125, 196, 254,
256

Peter, 106

Petrie, Flinders, 281

Petroleum, 302

Pharisees, 248

Pictures of God, 65

Pilgrim, 91

Plato, 52, 54, 98, 100, 212

Planck’s quantum theory, 213

Plotinus, 212

Plutarch, 160

Poincaré, 148, 150, 205, 216

Pope, 35

Preachers, 44

Priestley, 7

Priests and Prophets, 41

Printing, 32

Progress in ethics, 33

Promoter, Church as, 30

Prophets, 41, 158

Puritans, 27, 45, 54, 206

Relativity, 203, 223
Religion and Relativity, 203
Resurrection, 14

Revival of Witchcraft, 124
Ritual, 26

Rossetti, 102

Russell, Bertrand, 223

Sabbath, 22
Sargent, 56
Satan, 118, 299
Science, 36, 197

319

Scientific method, 69

Sermon without Text or Moral,
247

Sermons, 25, 194

Shakespeare, 259

Shaw, 165

Sinai, 201

Snoddy, George S., 127

Spengler, Oswald, 281, 282

partie rapes of Daily Life,
I

Squiers, George O., 109

Stewart, E. W., 209

Struggle for Existence, 137

Superstition, 124, 134

Symbolism, 75

Teaching, 44

Telling the Truth, 175

Ten Commandments, 50, 155,
288

Tennyson, 64, 105, 243

Theology, 21, 39, 65

Tobit, 58

Truth, 175, 180

Tyndale, William, 262

Uses of Adversity, 137

Vaihinger, 173
Van Loon, 252
Van Tyne, 37
Voliva, 134

Walker, Williston, 46
Washington, 91

Wells, 58

Weyl, Hermann, 221

Whately, Archbishop, 230
When We Were Heathen, 273
Whitehead, Alfred North, 221
Whitworth, Clarence W., 63
Wisdom, 191

Witchcraft, 130, 132

Xenophanes, 72

Zeus, 71
Zoroaster, 54, 205

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